Re: Bumping MI protocol

Bob Rossi
2004-10-06T17:02:41Z

On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 09:57:27AM -0700, Felix Lee wrote:
> "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org>:
> > > From: Bob Rossi <bob@brasko.net>
> > > Exscuse me for being frank, your statements about this question are foolish.
> >
> > I, for one, don't think Nathan's comments are foolish. As a volunteer
> > project, we shouldn't waste too much time discussing hypothetical
> > issues.
>
> I agree with Eli and Nathan, from a different angle.
>
> I've never tried implementing a gdb front-end, but if I had to do
> one, I wouldn't rely on gdb conforming exactly to any particular
> specification, because bugs happen, and eliminating all bugs is
> not going to happen in my lifetime.

OK, so here it is again. GDB does not plan on supporting people that
generate there parser from the official MI output syntax ( grammar )?

> users are unlikely to be happy about restarting a complicated
> debugging session when they encounter a bug in the debugger, so a
> robust front-end will need to do some sanity checking of the
> conversation, and it will also need a method of resynchronizing
> the conversation when the sanity checks fail.

Yes, the grammar needs to change. This should all be taken into account
during the development of an MI protocol. Tests should be made for every
MI output command, and the output should be tested to make sure they
conform to the syntax.

> if a front-end has this basic adaptability, then it's not that
> big a deal if any one-off version of gdb doesn't conform exactly
> to spec. so you can concentrate effort on making things work
> well for the versions of gdb that are commonly in use.
> --

Yes yes, you want to see me write one large parser that handles
everything and anything thrown at it, including the english language.

Bob Rossi