Re: GDB PR categories

[Andrew Cagney <ac131313@redhat.com>]

> * If you're going to create so many categories, how about one for each
>   debugging format as well?

I think it might confuse things.  The only way the average user is going 
to spot a symtab bug is by GDB printing out:
	internal-error: symtab.c: .....
:-)

> * Another thing to consider kind of reflecting is the testsuite: so
>   arch, asm, base, c++, (chill), disasm, fortran, gdb, hp, java, log,
>   mi, stabs, sum, threads, trace.  Maybe that would be a good place to
>   start from; and then, as we noticed that there were, say, a large
>   number of bugs about a specific subcategory of one of those
>   categories, we could fork off a separate PR/testsuite category for
>   it?

GDB's testsuite directory is split more along functional lines.

>   Though, now that I think about it, the two lists of categories
>   shouldn't be identical: if a bug currently is present only on a
>   particular platform but the command sequence to manifest that bug
>   makes sense on any platform, then the testsuite case shouldn't be
>   placed in a platform-specific location.

Yes.  Most test cases are generic.  The only non-generic directory is 
gdb.arch where tests need to verify the exact value of registers.

Separatly I was wondering about a test-bug `class'.

> * I definitely think that doing this incrementally would be a good
>   idea; you've proposed more than 50 categories, and there are only

Dam!  You spotted my cunning plan.  I was going to spread the bugs so 
thinly that no one could find them and hence think GDB had no problems ;-)

>   476 non-closed PR's, so probably some of the categories would be too
>   sparse to bother with for now.  Maybe you could follow the 'os' lead
>   and have 'other arch' and 'other language' categories (where, say,
>   pascal/scheme/ada/objc could be in the latter but c++ and java get
>   their own PR categories), forking off a new arch/language/os
>   whenever the appropriate 'other' category gets too large to
>   conveniently browse.

Yes, that makes sense.  If there is an active maintainer create the 
category otherwize leave it for ``other'':

arch-i386
arch-mips

os-GNU/Linux
os-bsd

lang-c++

???-thread
???-macro

ui-misc
ui-mi
ui-tui

I just wonder if somone will get confused by having to choose between 
``other arch/lang/os/ui/...  I guess create xxx-other on demand as well.

(BTW, anyone know the story with ``-'' in categories.  I think fernando 
indicated that it wasn't valid but the online docs 
(http://www.gnu.org/software/gnats/ uses that in the examples.)

thanks,
Andrew