Re: [MI] -stack-list-variables

Vladimir Prus
2009-09-22T05:31:34Z

On Tuesday 22 September 2009 Nick Roberts wrote:

> > > But what would happen the day a front-end starts caring? Are they
> > > going to have to send 2 MI commands to get the info?
> >
> > No. The frontend author would write an email to gdb@sources.redhat.com,
> > explaining the reasons, and a new field will be added as result. That's
> > how I'd prefer MI to evolve, as opposed to adding information ahead of
> > the time.
>
> That's exactly what I have done.

Hmm, I must have missed. You never said that you want to implement this-and-that
in Emacs, and explained why and how. What you said was you consider the separation
"useful", which is considerably more weaker statement.

Are you actually planning on implementing locals/arg separation in Emacs in
observable timeframe?

> and:
>
> > I am frankly surprised by the amount of support for this feature, and
> > the fact that this support say this is harmless, and possibly
> > useful, but does not name any single frontend that actually separates
> > arguments from "true" locals.
>
> I'm not sure that `proof by example' should be necessary. but here's an
> example showing Totalview separate the two:
>
> http://upc.lbl.gov/docs/user/ProcessWindow.png
>
> Totalview is probably the world's best C/C++ debugger

Uhm, this is very subjective statement (though you seem to use Totalview as
example regularly). Looking on the screenshot, I am not impressed.

> (apart fron GDB, of
> course!). I'm sure that if their users didn't want this feature, Etnus would
> remove it.

I am not aware how marketing/management/design works at that company, so I
cannot comment on this.

> As a maintainer I would try to accommodate such requests and reserve my
> judgements for technical matters.

I disagree. Sensible frontend interface is only possible if we (or I) understand
specific use cases that are supported, and how they are supposed, as opposed to
working from requests to add some information to some command.

- Volodya