Re: obsoleting the annotate level 2 interface

[Michael Elizabeth Chastain <mec@shout.net>]

Jim Blandy writes:
> If folks agree that annotate level 2 should go, we could:
> - announce that annotate level 2 will be disabled in the release after
>   next;
> - in that release, disable the code, but leave it there, to see if
>   anyone complains, and whether they can be persuaded to switch to MI;
>   and
> - in the release after that, if all goes well, remove the code to
>   support annotation level 2.

According to the NEWS file in gdb 5.1, the annotation interface
is deprecated.  So I say, go for it!

There is one PR open against annotation level 2: pr gdb/785.  I think we
can quash it if we remove annotation level 2.  I sent mail to the
submitter, rros7605@postoffice.uri.edu, about other matter (pr gdb/786)
on 2003-01-01 and haven't heard back from them, so they probably don't
care.  And if we remove annotation level 2, then we don't care.

gdb.c++/annota2.exp reports two KFAIL's which are unrelated to
annotation.  One KFAIL is about a hardware watchpoint that triggers on
the first instruction after resuming a breakpoint.  The other is about
sending a ^C and then immediately reading from gdb (I suspect there is a
race condition here but I'm not sure).  Actually it would be good to
move those tests to a different test script right now, because it's such
a pain to work with an annotation-enabled test script.

I've made a note in my TODO list to do that.

> Personally, I'd like to see Emacs switch from annotation level 1 to
> MI, too; then we could get rid of annotation altogether.  But I think
> it makes sense to tackle level 2 first, since I don't think it has
> many users (if any).

emacs invokes gdb with "gdb -fullname" so it's just our gdb code which
maps that to "annotate level 1".  We can continue to do the same
behavior and just call it the "fullname" flag instead of the
"annotation" flag.

It looks a bit hard to remove the behavior, because lisp/gud.el
interacts with many different debuggers.  I suppose it would be nice to
have a new emacs gdb interface which takes full advantage of MI, but
that would not make lisp/gud.el obsolete, so the "-fullname" behavior
would not be obsolete.

Michael C