Re: [PATCH] Another annotation for threads

Joel Brobecker
2008-06-06T06:59:41Z

> It might be construed as bad attitude but I don't really understand why
> there is so much concern about such a small change that will only impact
> thosee who use GDB from Emacs.

I don't personally consider this bad attitude, as you had some technical
arguments in favor of your approach. I balanced the various advantages
and drawbacks of both approaches, and judged that, although I would have
still prefered us to use observers, your approach was an acceptable
temporary compromise (temporary meaning until annotation are removed).
One of the elements on which I based my judgement was the fact that
I understood that this was going to be the only new annotation.

> A while ago (three years actually) I submitted a patch to remove far more
> markup than I am adding:
>
> http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2005-06/msg00189.html
>
> but there was no interest.
>
> It started from a dialogue with Andrew Cagney to relieve some of the
> pressure to remove the remaining annotations but only drew a response
> from Bob Rossi. I think we concluded that the breakpoints-invalid and
> frames-invalid annotations could go. So I'll offer now to submit
> another patch just to remove those twoannotations (which fired far too
> often, anyway). This should more than make up for the two I've just
> added.

My perspective on this is that I would like to see as little effort
spent on annotations as possible. If you think the change is going
to make GDB better, then perhaps your suggestion is worth it. If it's
just to reduce the pressure to remove annotations from GDB, then
I think we need to look at the maintenance cost of keeping them in.
If possible, I'd rather remove them all in one go rather than remove
some of them in exchange for the new ones being added.

I don't know the annotations well enough to know what the actual impact
might be. They might make GDB better. But I'm quite concerned about
the front ends out there that might be relying on some the annotations
that are proposed to be removed.

--
Joel