Building gdb requires various tools and packages to be available. Other packages will be used only if they are found.
Expat is used for:
The ‘zlib’ library is likely included with your operating system
distribution; if it is not, you can get the latest version from
http://zlib.net.
iconv
implementation. If you are
on a GNU system, then this is provided by the GNU C Library. Some
other systems also provide a working iconv
.
On systems with iconv
, you can install GNU Libiconv. If you
have previously installed Libiconv, you can use the
--with-libiconv-prefix option to configure.
gdb's top-level configure and Makefile will
arrange to build Libiconv if a directory named libiconv appears
in the top-most source directory. If Libiconv is built this way, and
if the operating system does not provide a suitable iconv
implementation, then the just-built library will automatically be used
by gdb. One easy way to set this up is to download GNU
Libiconv, unpack it, and then rename the directory holding the
Libiconv source code to ‘libiconv’.