Re: MI: changing breakpoint location

Jim Ingham
2006-03-17T00:23:58Z

Just a single data point...

The old NeXT gdb had a move breakpoint feature that was there because
the ProjectBuilder guys had asked for it as some point in the distant
past. Maybe Michael remembers about this - it was before my time.
At one point we were merging from the FSF gdb and the command broke.
So I went to talk to the guy who worked on the ProjectBuilder
debugger at the time, and it turned out he had stopped using it a
while before we broke it. IIRC, he said that since he already had
code to set breakpoints with all their conditions, etc; to query out
all these settings (needed for saving breakpoints between sessions)
and to delete them, it was cleaner to use that code over than to have
a different code path for moving breakpoints.

So we dropped it, and we haven't been asked for it again.

Jim

On Mar 16, 2006, at 4:04 PM, Joel Brobecker wrote:

>> BTW, this does make me think about the original request
>> differently; it
>> does seem a bit awkward to have to delete and recreate breakpoints
>> every time the user edits a source file. Maybe it isn't. I don't
>> know...
>
> Just my few cents:
>
> To me, it was initially expected and normal. But then there are some
> issues GUIs have to be careful of, probably derived from the fact that
> the new breakpoint would have a different ID. They have to transfer
> over conditions expressions, command lists, etc.
>
> For some reason I can't put my finger on, I feel against such a
> feature,
> but then it would make things simpler for the GUI, and the user would
> not be confused by a different breakpoint number when the location
> is modified...
>
> Doesn't seem like something that would be too hard to implement
> either,
> right? Something like "move-breakpoint break-id new-location". If it
> added to GDB, I would make it available for CLI as well, might as
> well.
>
> --
> Joel