Re: CLI and GDB/MI documentation patch

Daniel Jacobowitz
2006-05-12T19:01:58Z

On Fri, May 12, 2006 at 09:55:38PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Fri, 12 May 2006 14:37:23 -0400
> > From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
> >
> > So, for someone who must support multiple versions of GDB, they would
> > have to read NEWS looking for changes, find the new behavior in the
> > current manual, and find the old (hopefully documented) behavior in the
> > old manual?
>
> No. I propose to have a special section devoted to incompatible
> changes in the remote protocol, and another one for incompatible
> changes in MI. Thus, no searching is necessary.

New sections in NEWS, you mean? I see.

> As for old behavior, since the old versions of protocol/MI is already
> supported by the tools whose authors are the audience of these NEWS
> sections, I'd expect them to be well acquainted with the old behavior.
> So I don't think they will need to look for that.

No, I can't support that assumption. New tools, written today, are
probably written against a fairly current manual. Then someone
approaches you and says "I'd like to use your nice IDE on our stable
enterprise platform from three years ago which has an older GDB". The
range of supported GDBs does not only grow forwards.

> If you feel we should tell how to create a front end and/or a stub
> that supports several versions of GDB/MI or remote protocol, that's
> fine by me, but let's have sections whose focus is to provide tips to
> such programmers, not to tell the history of MI or the protocol's
> evolution. That's quite a different attitude than what Bob wrote.

I do think that such a section would be useful. I'm not entirely sure
about the distinction you are drawing, though. Is it a "what" versus
"why" difference?

--
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery