[RFC] "actionpoints"?

[Stan Shebs <stan@codesourcery.com>]

One of the issues that has come up regularly in our tracepoint work is 
what GDB's messages to the user should say when they are referring to 
various combinations of tracepoints and breakpoints.  We haven't dealt 
with it consistently so far, sometimes writing code to specifically say 
"tracepoint" when all the objects are tracepoints, sometimes saying "or" 
with several types, and sometimes relying on GDB's overloading of 
"breakpoint" to mean both stopping places and anything that uses the 
breakpoint.c infrastructure.

Although we've been doing the overloading for a long time, it's really 
abusing our terminology, and has to be confusing to users.

It turns out there is a generic term available - "actionpoint".  It 
originally comes from TotalView I think, and was adopted into the HPD 
(high performance debugger) spec back in the 90s.

A plus is that the term is sufficiently vague that it is sensible for 
watchpoints, catchpoints, tracepoints, breakpoints, and the rest of the 
menagerie, including future ideas we haven't thought of yet.  A minus is 
that it means having to teach an unfamiliar term to users, and it 
entails a certain amount of hacking up the manual.

There is also the risk that some (and you know who you are :-) ) will 
feel an overwhelming urge to rename source code to actionpoint.c, struct 
actionpoint, etc, which I *don't* want to do - it's a lot of busywork 
that doesn't directly help the user.  Right now I just want to think 
about how to give good feedback to users; should we introduce a new 
term, continue using "breakpoint", concoct phrases with "/" and "or", or 
do something else entirely?

Stan