RE: Another proposal for frontends and queries.

Marc Khouzam
2009-09-22T00:46:52Z

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom Tromey [mailto:tromey@redhat.com]
> Sent: September-18-09 12:42 PM
> To: Marc Khouzam
> Cc: 'Joel Brobecker'; 'gdb-patches@sourceware.org'
> Subject: Re: Another proposal for frontends and queries.
>
> >>>>> "Marc" == Marc Khouzam <marc.khouzam@ericsson.com> writes:
>
> Marc> The last (I think :-)) part that I don't understand is
> if a FE must
> Marc> code in advance for a potential query? This solution
> seems to go
> Marc> towards a way that would allow a FE to be ready for any query
> Marc> on any command. A new query could be added to a
> command by a new GDB
> Marc> version, and FEs would not need to change. That would
> be nice.
> Marc> Is that how you see it?
>
> Yeah -- a front end could choose what to do, even present the query to
> the user.
>
> Marc> I'm asking because, in some case a FE
> Marc> will want to answer the query itself, without seeking
> input from the user.
> Marc> For example, for PRecord, when the query asks if we
> should allow to change
> Marc> memory, I won't ask the user, I just want to say 'y'.
> Marc> I don't see how a FE could be smart enough to generically answer
> Marc> queries like that? (unless we code for it in advance)
>
> Yeah, good point. This seems to imply that the query "error" should
> include a token naming the query -- and I guess that such
> tokens should
> remain stable over time. (I was hoping to avoid that...)
>
> Marc> On the flip side, if a FE knows in advance the potential queries
> Marc> to a specific command, then maybe all we need is some
> new MI general
> Marc> parameter "-query <y | n>" that could be added by the frontend
> Marc> to any command (some details would need to be worked
> out to handle
> Marc> multiple queries in the same command though).
>
> Marc> Does this make sense?
>
> Yes, except that the queries could also change over time.
>
> I'm not sure this is a great idea after all. Maybe the solution is
> really just to have all queries default to "go ahead and do it" in MI.
> I really don't know.

Yeah, it's not simple.
In the short term, thanks to support from the maintainers, I'm hoping
we'll get to this default "go ahead and do it".
After that, maybe we can figure out some nice MI way to handle queries.

Marc