Re: Merging manuals (was Re: How do you use GDB to debug GDB)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il>]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Michael Elizabeth Chastain wrote:

> gdb.texinfo is in some sense a public interface which is meant to be
> stable.  But information in gdbint.texinfo is not a public interface
> and can change at any moment.

As Andrew says, ``humor me''.

IMHO, we have a looong way to go before we could claim that any of our
documents are complete enough to make the interface stability
consideration enter our radar screens.  Try to diff gdb.texinfo from
v5.0 against the current version and see for yourself: it's still very
much in a fluid phase.  And rightly so: we still have a lot to do to
to make it exhaustive and well-indexed (I'm still finding myself
looking for index entries that aren't there too often).

> For example, someone could re-implement the symbol table with tries
> instead of hash tables (I would really like this!).  That would affect
> gdbint.texinfo, but it would not affect gdb.texinfo.

I'd be happy if I could assume such reimplementation will be
documented as part of the redesign; right now, most changes are not
accompanied with documentation.  Heck, I'd be happy if the _current_
design of symbol tables were documented.  While Michael happened to
pick up one of the more documented aspects of GDB internals, even
symtabs docs leaves a lot to be desired.  For example, minsyms are not
documented at all.

In other words, there are more omissions in gdbint.texinfo than there
is information.  I don't think the rate of change matters, given this.