Re: Bob's MI objective

[Bob Rossi <bob at brasko dot net>]

On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 06:36:02PM -0400, Andrew Cagney wrote:
> >   * I would like to know what GDB's policy is in regards to supporting old
> >     MI protocols.  ( I have received several opposing views on this )
> 
> By "supported" you're expecting?  I've stated what people developing GDB 
> test, and given you a pretty clear hint as to the consequence.

Understood, here is what I am hoping for at a minimum. 

   * GDB supports at least 1 MI protocol for an official release. 
     Supporting multiple MI protocols would be better for me, but 
     not a requirement. If GDB could support multiple protocols it 
     would improve the chances of a given front end working with a
     given GDB.

   * GDB supports at least 1 MI protocol for a CVS snapshot. The
     development MI protocol is probably not suitable for front ends
     to work with, until it has stabilized and become official. So I am
     hoping that GDB supports the last officially supported MI protocol
     during it's development process, until the development protocol is
     ready to become stable.

> I was wondering more of what your project and its goals were.

CGDB is the front end I am working on, that said, I am actually not
doing all of the development of CGDB, just some of it.

I am focusing more on libtgdb. This is basically a library that is
capable of communicating with GDB with any interface that GDB supports.

It already supports annotate 2, now I am adding support for MI2. I would 
like to make this library support annotate 2, MI2, MI3, ...

Any front end developer can than take this library, and use it for there
front end, thus removing the burden of communicating with GDB. In
essence it is a libgdb that works with any GDB, not just one. The
library will be light weight, to the point where it can be used for many
applications, not just front ends ( embedded into tools that need simple
functionality like backtrace's, ... ).

I am interested in making this library part of the GDB distro, but
wouldn't suggest such a thing until it works. I think it would be good
if GDB distributed not only the MI interface and doco, but a reference
implementation of dealing with the protocols.

All of this said, I have a goal of making MI work and make sure that the
MI output commands actually adhere to the MI output syntax by testing
this in the testsuite. Probably the next step would be to make sure that
the MI input syntax follows the same rules. However, I have not made it
that far.

Do these goals seem reasonable?

Thanks,
Bob Rossi