From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 16520 invoked by alias); 9 May 2012 21:17:03 -0000 Received: (qmail 16502 invoked by uid 22791); 9 May 2012 21:17:01 -0000 X-SWARE-Spam-Status: No, hits=-2.8 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_00,DKIM_SIGNED,DKIM_VALID,DKIM_VALID_AU,KHOP_THREADED,RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE,RCVD_IN_HOSTKARMA_YE,T_RP_MATCHES_RCVD X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from elasmtp-galgo.atl.sa.earthlink.net (HELO elasmtp-galgo.atl.sa.earthlink.net) (209.86.89.61) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.43rc1) with ESMTP; Wed, 09 May 2012 21:16:47 +0000 Received: from [68.96.200.16] (helo=macbook2.local) by elasmtp-galgo.atl.sa.earthlink.net with esmtpa (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1SSEFb-0005Ko-7Y; Wed, 09 May 2012 17:16:47 -0400 Message-ID: <4FAADEBE.7010908@earthlink.net> Date: Wed, 09 May 2012 21:17:00 -0000 From: Stan Shebs User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:12.0) Gecko/20120428 Thunderbird/12.0.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Eli Zaretskii CC: gdb-patches@sourceware.org Subject: Re: 'info os' additions again References: <4FA9A2FA.3090307@earthlink.net> <83k40m0xqt.fsf@gnu.org> In-Reply-To: <83k40m0xqt.fsf@gnu.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-ELNK-Trace: ae6f8838ff913eba0cc1426638a40ef67e972de0d01da940a258c489d5a9fe9c513e101a57f71185350badd9bab72f9c350badd9bab72f9c350badd9bab72f9c X-IsSubscribed: yes Mailing-List: contact gdb-patches-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-patches-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2012-05/txt/msg00323.txt.bz2 On 5/8/12 9:44 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote: >> Date: Tue, 08 May 2012 15:49:30 -0700 >> From: Stan Shebs >> >> I tend to favor "info os ..." because it fits the >> progressive refinement that is a hallmark of GDB commands - the user can >> remember it as "info, and it's OS-related, but I just want semaphores". >> The user doesn't have to consider what OS name might be expected, "os" >> always works to connect to the class of OS-specific info displays. >> >> However, we also have an alternate tradition of "info >> ...", including "info dos", "info w32", "info spu", etc. By that >> tradition, Linux-specific info should be "info linux", and if there were >> BSD OS info, it would be "info bsd", and so forth. It's simpler to >> document, because the manual can just have a section for each subcommand >> that enumerates the subsubcommands that are available. Unfortunately >> for consistency, we've also had "info os" for several years. > My personal take of this is that (since quite naturally, most of the > new features introduced into GDB are Linux-specific), "info os" will > rapidly become a hodgepodge of Linux-specific commands, with only a > few supported on other platforms. At that point, "info os" will > simply be a grossly misleading name, confusing to users of other > platforms and hard to describe clearly in the documentation. I suppose that's possible, although when originally scoping this particular addition, I looked over the list of OS objects and included everything that seemed of interest to user-space programs. There are many kind of additional objects available via /proc, but they are control and systemwide maintenance things that have very little to do with debugging an app, and I'm not seeing that anyone could make a compelling argument that in-GDB access would be of value. > > FWIW, I never understood the reason why others prefer "info os". I'm sure a lot of it comes from the same-but-differentness of the Unix family. I myself have my right hand on a Macbook and left hand on a Dell running Linux, and so if I'm sticking to Posix API, I want GDB to work the same on the two. Stan