Re: [PATCH 0/2] Better handling of slow remote transfers

Pedro Alves
2015-08-12T10:05:45Z

On 08/11/2015 06:22 PM, Doug Evans wrote:
> Gary Benson writes:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Since March or so GDB has been able to access inferior binaries for
> > remote targets without having to be explicitly told to. This caused
> > problems for some people with slow connections:
> >
> > https://sourceware.org/ml/gdb/2015-07/msg00038.html
> >
> > The first patch in this series adds the warning messages requested
> > in that thread. The second commit should make long transfers
> > interruptible.
> >
> > Built and regtested on RHEL 6.6 x86_64.
> >
> > Ok to commit?
>
> For 7.10, one thought is to maintain the behaviour of 7.9
> and give ourselves more time to address this.

Agreed. My opinion, as expressed elsewhere in the gdb@ thread,
is that in order to be able to have target: by default in 7.10, we'd
try to both sort out the interruptibility and add a suggestive
warning, assuming both were easy to do, and not invasive,
and check if that would be a sufficient resolution. Seems like
the interruptibility issue isn't trivial to solve, so I think we
need to go do that -- change the default sysroot back to "", (and tweak
the docs/NEWS accordingly), and buy some time to sort this out on master.
Users can still then put "set sysroot target:" in .gdbinit with 7.10,
integrators should still be able to build with --with-sysroot=target: (or
revert the future-default-sysroot-reversion patch), and we can
continue addressing identified issues until "target:" (or something
around it, maybe building up on Jan's buildid work) can be made
the default, on master.

> IOW, can we have (or is there already) a configure
> option that controls the default behaviour,
> and can we default it to what 7.9 does
> (not auto-fetch files) ?

I think that would be the existing --with-sysroot.

Thanks,
Pedro Alves