From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 384 invoked by alias); 26 Jun 2007 21:55:55 -0000 Received: (qmail 371 invoked by uid 22791); 26 Jun 2007 21:55:54 -0000 X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from mail.codesourcery.com (HELO mail.codesourcery.com) (65.74.133.4) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.31) with ESMTP; Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:55:51 +0000 Received: (qmail 10936 invoked from network); 26 Jun 2007 21:55:49 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO localhost) (jimb@127.0.0.2) by mail.codesourcery.com with ESMTPA; 26 Jun 2007 21:55:49 -0000 To: Markus Deuling Cc: Eli Zaretskii , Robert Dewar , pkoning@equallogic.com, eager@eagercon.com, stanshebs@earthlink.net, gdb@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: What's an annex? stratum? References: <467D5FEF.7010900@eagercon.com> <467D6D1F.7090507@earthlink.net> <467D6FB8.4080909@eagercon.com> <468009EA.4040504@eagercon.com> <18048.5444.903092.843811@pkoning.equallogic.com> <20070625193135.GA6391@caradoc.them.org> <4680199F.7020906@adacore.com> <46815BC2.9070204@de.ibm.com> From: Jim Blandy Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:55:00 -0000 In-Reply-To: <46815BC2.9070204@de.ibm.com> (Markus Deuling's message of "Tue, 26 Jun 2007 20:32:34 +0200") Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.0.50 (gnu/linux) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-IsSubscribed: yes Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2007-06/txt/msg00318.txt.bz2 The question "is X worthwhile" is ill-formed. We all understand that the real question is, "given our time and abilities, is X among the things we should do now?" At the moment, GDB: - can't print a C++ map value in any reasonable form, or even a vector, or carry out many other essential C++ operations, - can't debug multiple processes at the same time, - is slow to start up on large programs, and uses a lot of memory, - can't let other threads continue to run while one is stopped, - can't be scripted in a reasonable language, - or do many other things we all could think of. Time spent on the internals documentation has, itself, no effect on users' experience with GDB. It's only worthwhile if that time, plus the time then spent doing something users *will* notice, is less than the time needed just to do something user-visible without internals documentation. I want to hear an internals documentation advocate say, "I'm going to work on the internals documentation because I think the date at which user-visible project X is complete will move closer when I do so." I am *not* a seat-of-the-pants coder. Read prologue-value.h or macrotab.h if you want to know my values. But I know that life is short and uncertain, and that the pursuit of beauty has no regard for that.