Re: MI output command error

Daniel Jacobowitz
2005-03-10T17:52:53Z

On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 12:44:08PM -0500, Bob Rossi wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
>
> The whole idea of GDB being asyncronous is new to me. Up until now, I
> have been very content thinking that GDB would become "busy" whenver the
> inferior was started up to do some work.
>
> I would really like to understand the concept and the reason why GDB had
> to have the asyncronous feature. While looking for documentation on GDB
> being asyncronous, I've only found very little. A grep of gdb.texino
> yeilded me nothing interesting.

Sorry, I don't know anything more about async mode than is in the
documentation (and mailing list archives - it has come up plenty of
times).

It shouldn't take much thinking to understand why asynchronous
operation is desirable. A user interface is _always_ asynchronous,
because your human user never blocks.

I'm as mystified as Dave as to how you could read the manual and
believe GDB/MI was designed to operate synchronously. A number of MI
commands have documentation that begins with "Asynchronous command." In
particular, look at -exec-interrupt, which makes no sense as a
synchronous command.

> I noticed that the command line option is not documented in the manual.
> Which made me think it didn't exist. However, when I run gdb --help,
> it's there.
> gdb --help
> --[no]async Enable (disable) asynchronous version of CLI
>
> When I try to use the option, it fails,
>
> $ gdb --async ./main
> gdb: unrecognized option `--async'
> Use `gdb --help' for a complete list of options.
>
> $ gdb --noasync ./main
> gdb: unrecognized option `--noasync'
> Use `gdb --help' for a complete list of options.
>
> Am I doing something wrong?

2004-07-16 Andrew Cagney <cagney@gnu.org>

* defs.h (event_loop_p): Replace variable declaration with macro,
always 1.
* main.c (captured_main): Delete options "-async" and "-noasync".
(event_loop_p): Delete variable.
* NEWS: Mention that "-async" and "-noasync" were removed.

He missed --help; please fix that.

--
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery, LLC