From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 14750 invoked by alias); 26 Jan 2006 05:57:48 -0000 Received: (qmail 14742 invoked by uid 22791); 26 Jan 2006 05:57:47 -0000 X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from nevyn.them.org (HELO nevyn.them.org) (66.93.172.17) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.31.1) with ESMTP; Thu, 26 Jan 2006 05:57:46 +0000 Received: from drow by nevyn.them.org with local (Exim 4.54) id 1F208e-0007j5-Q9 for gdb@sourceware.org; Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:57:44 -0500 Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 07:01:00 -0000 From: Daniel Jacobowitz To: gdb@sourceware.org Subject: Using XML in GDB? Message-ID: <20060126055744.GA29647@nevyn.them.org> Mail-Followup-To: gdb@sourceware.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.8i X-IsSubscribed: yes Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2006-01/txt/msg00258.txt.bz2 Hi folks, I've spent the last week and a half working on the "target available feature" interface that I described on this list last May. A big chunk of the last two days has been spent trying to nail down a useful format to store (in files) and transfer (over the remote protocol) descriptions of remote "features", especially their register sets. At first I was primarily focused on compactness. But I've got a pretty good handle on that problem now; a well-defined naming scheme and some caching, and the size of the data is no longer a major concern. That leaves expressibility, parsability, and extensibility. At which point I eventually asked myself why I was reinventing the wheel. And we get all sorts of things for free; for instance, UTF-8, which will be handy if someone ever wants to include internationalized descriptions in the target description. Does anyone have a good reason why GDB should not make use of this well-standardized format instead of inventing additional ad-hoc formats? Where appropriate, of course. People sometimes use XML for the silliest things. -- Daniel Jacobowitz CodeSourcery