Re: [PATCH] Fix python compatibility with old versions of GDB

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Tom Tromey <tom@tromey.com>
> Cc: Orgad Shaneh <orgads@gmail.com>,  gdb-patches@sourceware.org
> Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2017 06:11:57 -0600
> 
> >>>>> "Simon" == Simon Marchi <simon.marchi@polymtl.ca> writes:
> 
> >> Practically the data-directory is mostly backwards-compatible, except
> >> this small part which I found (there might be others which I didn't
> >> find). With this patch, I'm able to run GDB 7.8 with the latest
> >> data-directory.
> 
> >> Is there a reason not to accept it?
> 
> Simon> I'd like to know what other maintainers think about this.  We may have
> Simon> already faced this situation before and taken a decision which I'm not
> Simon> aware of.  Otherwise, we need to take it now.
> 
> I think it doesn't make sense to have a policy allowing the sharing of
> installed Python scripts across versions.  If this were a policy then it
> would mean that the scripts could never use new features of gdb's Python
> layer -- but that's clearly an absurd result.

FWIW, I always configure GDB to use a version-specific data-directory,
because I leave old GDB versions (renamed) on my system, so I could
still use them after installing a new version.  E.g., if the new
version turns out to have a bug.  I would actually be happier if we
changed our installation scripts to do that by default, because the
scripts are almost never backward-compatible IME.