From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 30939 invoked by alias); 14 Oct 2003 20:45:22 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gdb-patches-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-patches-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 30887 invoked from network); 14 Oct 2003 20:45:21 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mx1.redhat.com) (66.187.233.31) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 14 Oct 2003 20:45:21 -0000 Received: from int-mx2.corp.redhat.com (nat-pool-rdu-dmz.redhat.com [172.16.52.200] (may be forged)) by mx1.redhat.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id h9EKjKM20051 for ; Tue, 14 Oct 2003 16:45:20 -0400 Received: from potter.sfbay.redhat.com (potter.sfbay.redhat.com [172.16.27.15]) by int-mx2.corp.redhat.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id h9EKjJL08522; Tue, 14 Oct 2003 16:45:19 -0400 Received: from redhat.com (reddwarf.sfbay.redhat.com [172.16.24.50]) by potter.sfbay.redhat.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id h9EKjIJ05799; Tue, 14 Oct 2003 13:45:19 -0700 Message-ID: <3F8C605E.1060604@redhat.com> Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 20:45:00 -0000 From: Michael Snyder Organization: Red Hat, Inc. User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Daniel Jacobowitz CC: gdb-patches@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: RFA: Breakpoint infrastructure cleanups [0/8] References: <20031008165534.GA8718@nevyn.them.org> <20031008190502.GA13579@nevyn.them.org> <3F846B04.2070801@redhat.com> <3F85B4AC.7000000@redhat.com> <20031014013831.GB6118@nevyn.them.org> <3F8C18DD.3020508@redhat.com> <20031014155126.GA10669@nevyn.them.org> In-Reply-To: <20031014155126.GA10669@nevyn.them.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2003-10/txt/msg00474.txt.bz2 Daniel Jacobowitz wrote: > On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 11:40:13AM -0400, Andrew Cagney wrote: > >>>Does anyone have any other comments on these eight submitted patches? >> >>Ask michael. > > > That's what I was doing :) I've been following, didn't really have anything to add. >>user/impl: >>user/mach: >>logical/physical >>virtual/actual >>abstract/actual [...] > That's +joel and +carlton. I'm not sure whether Michael was > objecting, but rereading his message it seems plausible - Michael? Argh, I hate these questions. ;-) The HPDF forum used to get bogged down endlessly in this level of detail. I don't think any of those pairs would convey at first glance what the distinction is, to an average user (I hesitated to say "naive"). With your or my knowledge of debugger internals, we might look at almost any of those and figure out what they mean, but ask someone who doesn't know what a register is... If this is just an internals issue, then toss a coin, it doesn't matter. But for the picture that we present to the user, remember -- we always present a fictional picture that hides most of the underlying details. The unsophisticated user thinks he is debugging his code -- not the underlying machine. If possible, he doesn't want to know eg. that line seventeen has been broken into several locations and intermixed with code from 3 other lines. We're sometimes forced to tell him anyway, but we don't if we can avoid it. From that perspective, I think a breakpoint is a breakpoint. To the user it represents a location in the *source* code. The fact that this may translate to several locations in the machine code is "under the hood", so to speak. If he wants that level of information, we should give it to him, but maybe the metaphor should reflect the fact that this is "what's inside the box", as opposed to, like, two different kinds of breakpoint (virtual/actual or whatever). So for instance, we might say that *this* is the breakpoint, and if you want to know, *these* are the breakpoint's *locations*. There -- you asked for my opinion. Are you happy? ;-)