Re: CLI and GDB/MI documentation patch

Daniel Jacobowitz
2006-05-12T18:37:31Z

On Fri, May 12, 2006 at 09:32:26PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> NEWS is the best place, IMO. It can list the incompatible changes,
> and point to the sections in the manual which describe the new
> behavior in detail. If you think this will not be good enough, please
> tell why.
>
> As a data point, the Emacs NEWS has special sections for incompatible
> changes. Emacs is a much larger package than GDB, and with much
> slower release rate, the amount of incompatible changes is also much
> larger. And yet this scheme works well for many years, and users came
> to depend on it and demand that any incompatible changes be mentioned.

So, for someone who must support multiple versions of GDB, they would
have to read NEWS looking for changes, find the new behavior in the
current manual, and find the old (hopefully documented) behavior in the
old manual?

Our current NEWS is basically bullet-points. That would definitely
need a change. OK, reasonable enough, I suppose, although it seems
awkward when we know that many of the people reading this chapter in
the manual will be interested in precisely this historical information.

Many shipping GDB frontends work on any version of GDB released in the
last several years and shipped by a large package distributor; that's a
lot of versions of GDB. I'm not sure the two cases are readily
comparable, though I realize that Emacs LISP programs probably have
similar issues.

--
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery