Re: RFC: Clean up "show remote"

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2006 at 11:20:26PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > > if a translator is anal about where to break, he should use non-breaking spaces
> > > (such as Unicode 160) and those answer false for iswspace
> > 
> > > iow, doing mbstowcs, breaking at iswspace, and converting back, should work.
> > >  but it's sort of a mess
> > 
> > > ask eli if that's correct.  maybe it's not.
> > 
> > Is that right?
> 
> I'm not sure I understand what Paolo is saying.  If he is saying that
> translators should bear the burden of forcing GDB not to break by
> using NBSP, then I think it's ridiculous: software should help us, not
> force us to work harder.

What he's saying is that a space in the output can be assumed to be a
safe place to line break, and if there is some reason why it should
not - from my look over the Unicode spec, a relatively rare and less
important case - then the translator would be well advised to use an
NBSP.  But, let's not focus on that yet - see below.

> > If not, is there some forum where I could get a definitive answer?
> 
> For the definitive answer, look in the Unicode standard (not for the
> faint at heart):
> 
>    http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/
> 
> > Right now we just write overlength messages to the screen.  I don't see
> > how that can be an improvement over breaking them at whitespace instead
> > of at the margins, but maybe I'm missing something?
> 
> I think, as long as we are not sure about how to solve this in
> general, manually breaking into two messages is better than letting
> code blissfully break at whitespace, because that leaves the job of
> breaking in other languages to a (human) translator.

Asking the translator do it defeats my goal - which is to adapt to the
user's terminal width, automatically.

I spent fifteen minutes or so looking over the relevant Unicode TR;
thank you for the reference.  I'd even be willing to implement a
substantial subset of it, if that's what it took to make GDB wrap
output prettily.  However, before I even think of doing that, I'd like
to rephrase my question.

Right now the GDB CLI is generally run either in a TTY or in some
wrapping environment (e.g. emacs).  I don't know much about the Emacs
case, but at least on a TTY, when we encounter the terminal's physical
margins we wrap - always.  No matter where we are within a word.

How is wrapping after spaces, as suggested by the Unicode TR but
without the remaining complexity of the TR, inferior to that?  We'd
check widths and space characters on the results of gettext, of course,
using appropriate wide character routines.

There are probably some cases where this would lead to oddly placed
line breaks.  I'm hypothesizing that there would be fewer oddly placed
line breaks even in the affected scripts than there are today.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery