From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 7428 invoked by alias); 27 Jan 2006 19:06:36 -0000 Received: (qmail 7420 invoked by uid 22791); 27 Jan 2006 19:06:36 -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; Fri, 27 Jan 2006 19:06:33 +0000 Received: from drow by nevyn.them.org with local (Exim 4.54) id 1F2YvV-0004VD-8Z; Fri, 27 Jan 2006 14:06:29 -0500 Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2006 06:33:00 -0000 From: Daniel Jacobowitz To: Paul Koning Cc: eliz@gnu.org, gdb@sourceware.org Subject: Re: Using XML in GDB? Message-ID: <20060127190629.GB16811@nevyn.them.org> Mail-Followup-To: Paul Koning , eliz@gnu.org, gdb@sourceware.org References: <20060126055744.GA29647@nevyn.them.org> <20060127180429.GA15726@nevyn.them.org> <17370.26869.663043.743656@gargle.gargle.HOWL> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <17370.26869.663043.743656@gargle.gargle.HOWL> 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/msg00315.txt.bz2 On Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 01:39:49PM -0500, Paul Koning wrote: > Eli> Is XML the only widely used standard that supports what we want? > > No, it isn't. > > You're essentially asking for an easily extensible, flexible > protocol. XML is one of those; it is the extremely verbose end of the > "make it all ASCII" approach used in the Internet for decades. Then > again, the same is true for the existing remote stub protocol. > > Another extensible protocol that comes with definition tools and > checkers, but is much more compact, is SNMP. Or, more precisely, > ASN.1 (the definition language) and BER/DER (the encoding rules). > > If one of the goals is bit efficiency of the encoding, rather than > maximum verbosity, then ASN.1/DER is far better than XML. Chances are > the implementation would be smaller, too. I'm curious; are there "authoring" tools for ASN.1? I need something that will work as both a file format and a wire protocol. Ah, it looks like there are. Debian has an emacs mode, a specification compiler, an object dumper, perl bindings, and two C libraries. A bit sparse compared to the XML tools available, but should be adequate if there's a compelling advantage for it. Beyond that, I'm not at all familiar with it. Of course, there's also some rumors of "an ASN.1 variant of XML"... and "gzip layered over XML", which is a pretty good one too. -- Daniel Jacobowitz CodeSourcery