From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 21315 invoked by alias); 12 May 2006 18:37:31 -0000 Received: (qmail 21305 invoked by uid 22791); 12 May 2006 18:37:29 -0000 X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from nevyn.them.org (HELO nevyn.them.org) (66.93.172.17) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.31.1) with ESMTP; Fri, 12 May 2006 18:37:26 +0000 Received: from drow by nevyn.them.org with local (Exim 4.54) id 1FecVv-0003mX-Pz for gdb-patches@sourceware.org; Fri, 12 May 2006 14:37:23 -0400 Date: Fri, 12 May 2006 18:55:00 -0000 From: Daniel Jacobowitz To: gdb-patches@sourceware.org Subject: Re: CLI and GDB/MI documentation patch Message-ID: <20060512183723.GA14434@nevyn.them.org> Mail-Followup-To: gdb-patches@sourceware.org References: <20060512011730.GA26655@brasko.net> <20060512124940.GB3860@nevyn.them.org> <20060512135802.GA6472@nevyn.them.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.8i X-IsSubscribed: yes Mailing-List: contact gdb-patches-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-patches-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2006-05/txt/msg00254.txt.bz2 On Fri, May 12, 2006 at 09:32:26PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > NEWS is the best place, IMO. It can list the incompatible changes, > and point to the sections in the manual which describe the new > behavior in detail. If you think this will not be good enough, please > tell why. > > As a data point, the Emacs NEWS has special sections for incompatible > changes. Emacs is a much larger package than GDB, and with much > slower release rate, the amount of incompatible changes is also much > larger. And yet this scheme works well for many years, and users came > to depend on it and demand that any incompatible changes be mentioned. 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? Our current NEWS is basically bullet-points. That would definitely need a change. OK, reasonable enough, I suppose, although it seems awkward when we know that many of the people reading this chapter in the manual will be interested in precisely this historical information. Many shipping GDB frontends work on any version of GDB released in the last several years and shipped by a large package distributor; that's a lot of versions of GDB. I'm not sure the two cases are readily comparable, though I realize that Emacs LISP programs probably have similar issues. -- Daniel Jacobowitz CodeSourcery