Re: Pascal language support patch preparation

[Mark Kettenis <kettenis at wins dot uva dot nl>]

   Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2000 15:16:19 +0100
   From: Pierre Muller <muller@cerbere.u-strasbg.fr>

   >Patches to create those new p-* files cannot be broken up of course,
   >but your patch also touches a lot of the other GDB files.  Breaking
   >those patches up in smaller though functionally related chunks makes
   >reviewing and applying the patches a lot easier.
   >
   >I'd advise you to do the following:
   >
   >1. If you need some tweaks in GDB that do not depend on the Pascal
   >   support itself, start submitting these ASAP.

     I don't think I really have such code !

Are you sure?  The patch I downloaded last fall includes changes to
breakpoint.c, findvar.c, i387-tdep.c, infcmd.c and source.c that seem
to be pretty independent of Pascal at first glance.

   >2. Then send the new p-* as one single patch.

    Alone ? tihs would just leave them  unused first !

That's not a problem.  The point is that these changes cannot break
anything, so they don't need a lot of attention.

   >3. Then send a patch that adds the code to hook in the GDB support.

    OK, here a would have the biggest part of the problems probably
   because some of the change are not trivial but I agree that I can probably
   splitt those.

That would indeed be best, since that lets the maintainer of that
particular part of GDB deal with problems one at a time, which in
general gets the changes integrated much quicker.

     For instance a big problem on which I spent a lot of time is to 
   get GDB to accept the fact the pascal is case insensitive
   this required changes in gnu-regex code !!

I'm sorry to hear that you spent a lot of time on it.  Modifying the
regex code is something that we should only do as a last resort since
it is shared with a lot of other GNU packages.  Maybe GDB should use
the POSIX functions instead of the BSD functions such that REG_ICASE
can be used when the default language is Pascal.

On the bright side: Case insensitivity would be convenient, but should
not be essential for basic Pascal support in GDB.  We should be able
to address this as a seperate issue.  I'll see what I can do.  For now
it is probably better to leave out this bit when you send your new
patches.

   >   indent --version gives "GNU indent 2.2.5"
   >   is that not the current version ??
   >
   >Yes it is, but it isn't the version that was used for reformatting the
   >GDB sources.  See:
   >
   >   http://sourceware.cygnus.com/ml/gdb/1999-q3/msg00014.html

    This not really very informative on the method that was used to do it !

Pardon me?  It clearly states that:  ``[Stan] used indent 1.9.1 (with
no arguments)''.

Mark