Re: 'info os' additions again

[Stan Shebs <stanshebs@earthlink.net>]

On 5/10/12 11:58 AM, Pedro Alves wrote:
> On 05/10/2012 07:42 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:
>
>> On 5/10/12 11:18 AM, Pedro Alves wrote:
>>> On 05/10/2012 07:12 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:
>>>
>>>> They're waiting for the GDB bits (including the MI patch which is in my queue) to become available, which is why I want to get this resolved one way or another.  It's a little ironic that Eclipse folks, who don't care about command-line syntax, are being blocked on a discussion of command-line syntax. :-)
>>>>
>>>> If everybody is tired of the issue, I'll just make a decision; things can always be changed later.
>>> What kind of decision?  What would exactly be the alternative?
>>>
>> To pick one of "info os" and "info linux".  I don't think there are many other credible alternatives; the subcommand should be a single
>> short word, with the rest of the work to be done by subsubcommands and/or arguments. "info unix" or "info posix" would qualify, but
>> historically we've tended to avoid using those terms in GDB commands, and one could argue that they have the
>> same vagueness/overloading issue that "os" does.
> Frankly, this reads as a misunderstanding of all whole thing to me.  Just
> picking out a name in isolation of the grand scheme doesn't make sense.
>
> How would "info linux" be implemented?  How would be backend know you're
> requesting linux specific data?  What would make "info linux" against a
> Windows target return error or nothing, instead of returning Windows
> specific tables?  What's the point in making "linux" be in the command
> name if the frontend is completely agnostic, by design, to what is beneath
> the command?
>
> IOW, renaming the command means implementing something completely different.
>

Well yes, of course the implementation would be completely different.  
The original objections to the patch were to the user interface, so we 
need to agree on that first.

In practice, an "info linux" would be installed as a target-specific 
command a la "info spu" and the like, and may or may not pass through 
generic table machinery before getting down to the linux-specific 
types.  It would probably be messier than the current design I think, 
but not excessively so.

Stan