From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Eli Zaretskii To: Michael Elizabeth Chastain Cc: ac131313@cygnus.com, shebs@apple.com, gdb@sourceware.cygnus.com, ischis2@home.com Subject: Re: Merging manuals (was Re: How do you use GDB to debug GDB) Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 15:59:00 -0000 Message-id: References: <200103202016.MAA27812@bosch.cygnus.com> X-SW-Source: 2001-03/msg00223.html 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.