Re: [patch#3 5/8] set auto-load safe-path

Joel Brobecker
2012-05-09T04:22:08Z

Sorry to be coming this late in the discussion, but I thought I'd make
one comment about the documentation:

> gdb/doc/
> 2012-03-29 Jan Kratochvil <jan.kratochvil@redhat.com>
>
> * gdb.texinfo (Auto-loading): Extend the "show auto-load"
> and "info auto-load" examples for safe-path. Put there also references
> for "set auto-load safe-path" and "show auto-load safe-path".
> New menu item for Auto-loading safe path.
> (Auto-loading safe path): New node.
> (Python Auto-loading): Update the expected output from "Missing"
> to "No".

I was trying to familiarize myself how things work, now, in terms of
auto-loading, so I started reading the documetnation and I really got
tricked into thinking that I'd be fine, and that things hadn't changed.
The problem is that setting such as "set auto-load local-gdbint on"
is not sufficient to get local .gdbinit files to get loaded automatically.
I was really surprised when I got a warning while trying to debug GDB.

I accept the new behavior, and the security claim, no problem.
I just think that we can improve on the documentation as follow:

In my opinion, we should definitely mention the "auto-load safe-path"
setting at the very beginning of the auto-load section, before we start
talking about the various kinds of files that can be automatically
loaded. And I also think that it would be beneficial to add a reference
to the safe-path setting in all "set auto-load ..." commands, to make
sure that people who quickly search the documentation do not miss the
important fact that setting "auto-load local-gdbinit" to "on" might not
be sufficient.

And lastly, it would have been nice if, after reading the documentation,
the user could have had a sense of what policy GDB implements by default.
For instance, GDB's default policy is to enable auto-loading of all
files, but only from trusted directories specified via the "auto-load
safe-path" setting.

--
Joel