Re: [PATCH] Hooks still needed for annotations

[Bob Rossi <bob at brasko dot net>]

> > Also, I think it's reasonable to say that GDB should have a parser that
> > FE's can use. The only way to have a parser that can be tested properly
> > is to allow it to be packaged and tested in GDB's testsuite. Otherwise,
> > if the annotations are removed, FE's like GVD, XXGDB, DDD, KGDB, ...
> > are either going to "go the way of the bison" or they are going to have
> > to write code that handles GDB/MI. Do we really want 5-10 GDB/MI
> > parser's out there (each with there own bugs)?
> 
> This is also unrelated to the removal of annotations.
> 
> I don't much think a parser is GDB's responsibility.  Offering one as a
> convenience, sure, maybe.  Note that a lot of frontends won't get to
> use it anyway!  If we ship it with GDB, then it's going to be covered
> under the GPL.

The more I think of it, the more I feel that I am correct on this. Even
if the parser was under the GPL, proprietary projects (Apple?) could
simply use the parse tree to translate the data into a nice format of
there own (XML?) and then communicate that to a parser thats linked into
there application. This type of solution would allow a closed source
company to get the benefits of an MI parser/semantical analyzer,
contribute to the project, and not have to think 1 second about low
level MI stuff in there FE.

Bob Rossi