From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 30051 invoked by alias); 25 Jun 2007 19:26:38 -0000 Received: (qmail 30042 invoked by uid 22791); 25 Jun 2007 19:26:37 -0000 X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from exprod8og53.obsmtp.com (HELO exprod8og53.obsmtp.com) (64.18.3.88) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.31) with SMTP; Mon, 25 Jun 2007 19:26:34 +0000 Received: from source ([12.110.134.31]) by exprod8ob53.obsmtp.com ([64.18.7.12]) with SMTP; Mon, 25 Jun 2007 12:24:06 PDT Received: from pkoning.equallogic.com.equallogic.com ([172.25.202.120]) by M31.equallogic.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.1830); Mon, 25 Jun 2007 15:19:35 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <18048.5444.903092.843811@pkoning.equallogic.com> Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 19:26:00 -0000 From: Paul Koning To: jimb@codesourcery.com Cc: eager@eagercon.com, stanshebs@earthlink.net, gdb@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: What's an annex? stratum? References: <467D5FEF.7010900@eagercon.com> <467D6D1F.7090507@earthlink.net> <467D6FB8.4080909@eagercon.com> <468009EA.4040504@eagercon.com> X-Mailer: VM 7.17 under 21.4 (patch 19) "Constant Variable" XEmacs Lucid X-IsSubscribed: yes Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2007-06/txt/msg00256.txt.bz2 >>>>> "Jim" == Jim Blandy writes: Jim> Well, let me try again to say what I meant: if you're new to Jim> GDB, you should not start by reading gdbint.texinfo. Instead, Jim> start by reading and grepping, and then experiment by debugging Jim> GDB with itself. If you ask a question, people may occasionally Jim> refer you to gdbint.texinfo. But it's not useful as a getting Jim> started guide for GDB hackers, and I think the effort required Jim> to make it so is far more than any of us have available. Jim> I'm even a little skeptical about the value of internals Jim> documentation at all. It seems to me that explanations like Jim> that belong in the code, where people are more likely to see Jim> them, keep them up to date, and delete them when appropriate. That's really unfortunate. Comments in code are useful but they are no substitute for properly written internals documentation. By contrast, the internals documentation of GCC seems to be pretty helpful and reasonably up to date. Given a program as complex and inscrutable as GDB, if the best you can tell newcomers is "use the source, Luke", you're going to turn off a lot of them. Only those who are extremely motivated will make progress against such a barrier. For example: Bug #186 has been troubling us on and off for a long time. I would like to fix it. But given that this involves going off into the deep jungle of the GDB symbol and type machinery, and the fact that there is no useable documentation for this stuff, I haven't been able to do this. paul