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From: Andrew Burgess <andrew.burgess@embecosm.com>
To: gdb-patches@sourceware.org
Subject: [RFC] Use of create_new_frame from 'frame'.
Date: Wed, 08 Jul 2015 17:09:00 -0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20150708170944.GA17985@embecosm.com> (raw)

The 'frame' command can cause 'create_new_frame' in some conditions:

  - When two arguments are passed, or
  - When one argument is passed that is not:
    - A valid index into the backtrace, or
    - A valid stack frame base address.

Personally, I dislike this behaviour because:

  1. It's easy to make a mistake using the frame command and create a
     new frame.  It's not obvious (I think) how to recover from this
     situation.  [ The answer is just to use 'frame' again with a
     valid frame specifier argument. ]

  2. As a backtrace can be possibly any depth then depending on where
     we stop alters which frames we can create.  This seems a little
     arbitrary.

We could improve #1 by not allowing small indexes that are close to
the number of frames in the backtrace, however, this feels like a bit
of a hack, and would be a little annoying on small targets where low
value addresses are actually valid.

I wonder then if there's a better way to offer this feature.  The two
possible choices (other suggestions welcome) are:

  1. Create a new command 'create-frame' that takes one or two
     arguments, and always creates and selects a new frame new frame.
     The frame command no longer creates new frames.

  2. Make 'frame' take an (optional) flag (like 'x', or
     'disassemble'), so a user can now say:
        frame /c STACK-ADDR PC-ADDR
     in order to create (and select) a new frame.  Without the /c flag
     no new frames are created.  With the flag only new frames are
     created, old frames are not selected.

What do people think?  Any alternative suggestions?

Thanks,
Andrew


             reply	other threads:[~2015-07-08 17:09 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2015-07-08 17:09 Andrew Burgess [this message]
2015-07-08 18:02 ` Pedro Alves
2015-07-08 19:42 ` Eli Zaretskii
2015-07-08 19:46   ` Pedro Alves
2015-07-08 20:06     ` Eli Zaretskii
2015-07-08 20:16   ` Andrew Burgess

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