Re: Bob's MI objective

[Bob Rossi <bob at brasko dot net>]

On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 05:26:52PM -0400, Bob Rossi wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 04:12:32PM -0400, Andrew Cagney wrote:
> > Bob, what's your overall objective here?  Perhaphs our lack of 
> > appreciation of your overriding goals is the reason that some (at least 
> > I) are feeling somewhat puzzled and confused.

Andrew, I would really like some closure on these issues, and since you
are the only MI maintainer that responds publically, I figured you could
help me out here.

I asked this question a week ago and still do not know the answer. This
is some information I must know in order to figure out how my front end
will deal with different versions of GDB, including CVS snapshots.

When I use "support" below, I mainly mean tested in the testsuite and
considered stable. 

>    * 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 )

A new way to phrase this would be, for a given release of GDB (not a CVS
snapshot), does that release support one MI protocol, or does it support
several MI protocols. The MI protocols need to be tested and stable.
A backwards incompatible change would bump the revision.

>    * I would like to ensure that my front end works well with snapshots
>      of GDB. I do not want to work with the MI development protocol, I
>      just want to work with the last officially supported protocol.

For CVS snapshots, does GDB only support (tested) the development MI
protocol? or does it support the last stable protocol? or does it
support multiple stable protocols?

A backwards incompatible change at this point would bump the revision at
first, but every other backwards compatible revision would not bump the
revision until the release, which then the protocol becomes tested and
stable.

>    * I would like to make sure that development protocols are never used
>      by my front end and that I can figure out all of the officially 
>      supported MI protocols that a given GDB supports.

This issue can have different solutions if we know the answer to the
questions above.

Thanks,
Bob Rossi