Re: Conditionals in GDB manual

[jtc@redbacknetworks.com (J.T. Conklin)]

>> I've been working over the GDB manual, and am looking at all the
>> conditionals in it; AMD29K, SPARCLET, VXWORKS, DOSHOST, POSIX, etc.
>> There are about 40 of them, and as far as I can tell, many of them
>> have never been used to make a subset manual.  The exceptions are a
>> Hitachi H8-specific manual done in 1993, and more recently an HP-UX
>> specific manual, although many of the HPPA conditionals should
>> appear in the generic manual also.
>> 
>> So I'm considering whacking most or all of the conditionals.  This
>> won't matter to most people, because the default build/configure
>> enables almost all of these conditionals.  However, if anybody has
>> a good use for a particular conditional, you'll know what it is and
>> can tell me, so that I preserve it.  (I'm already discussing the
>> HPPA bits with Roz de la Torre at HP.)

> Might it make more sense to have processor specific appendices?
> We need somewhere to put processor/os specific stuff.

Ideally, there would be One True GDB Manual that contained all
information for all hosts and targets, organized in such a way so
environment specific information could be identified and located
easily by readers.  Appendicies for both host and target specific
information might be a good way to accomplish this.

The many conditionals that select parts of the "Remote Debugging"
chapter seem to go along with this idea, although the individual
sections don't share the same outline of sub-sections and moving
them to an appendix might be a bit more of an overhaul than is 
envisioned.

As removing the conditionals doesn't preclude a more comprehensive
edit later, I'd be in favor of it.

	--jtc

-- 
J.T. Conklin
RedBack Networks