Re: breakpoint commands and finish

[Doug Evans <dje at transmeta dot com>]

Joel Brobecker writes:
 > However, in this particular case, I think that it was very easy to find
 > the information. The person was asking what the behavior of a "commands"
 > should be: the answer to his question is right there in the section
 > documenting the commands lists.
 > 
 > > It'd be nice if people got in the habit of specifying where exactly
 > > in the documentation to look.  e.g.
 > 
 > I disagree, unless the information is buried somewhere not obvious.
 > One very important lesson I learnt at university is how to find the
 > information myself. In this particular cases, all you have to do is
 > check the index, click on the name of the command you are interested
 > in "commands" in that case, and voila! The answer is right there.
 > I believe that actually letting people search themselves the location
 > of the information they are looking for is helpful.

Nice in theory (and academia ...).  In practice it often just annoys people.
("You had the answer right in front of you." (*1))
Sure, learning the info program (s/info/favorite/) is a useful thing
to encourage.  It's the forcing of when to spend the time that I question,
it may be an inopportune time for the asker (otherwise s/he might have
spent more time rtfm-ing ...).
And the obvious place to look isn't necessarily obvious to the person
asking the question (leading to more time spent).

Whether such things apply in this particular case I dunno.
Clearly Matt's first guess of where to look didn't work.
At what point one should give up and ask for help (and the inevitable
retribution for giving up too early) is always a minefield.

 > (BTW: I did give the answer to the question when it was asked a few days ago)

Well, one can quibble over this but no matter.
One can certainly argue this meta-discussion has gone on too long already.

---
bash$ info -f gdb.info -n 'Break Commands'
and grep for ignored.

-->

   Any other commands in the command list, after a command that resumes
execution, are ignored.  This is because any time you resume execution
(even with a simple `next' or `step'), you may encounter another
breakpoint--which could have its own command list, leading to
ambiguities about which list to execute.

---
(*1): No suggestion is made that that was necessarily the case here.
And no claim is made that one should always find the place in the manual
first.  But if you know it or know how to trivially find it, holding it
back is what I'm questioning.