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On Thu, Nov 16, 2006 at 04:24:58PM +0100, Frederic RISS wrote:On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 06:58 -0700, Greg Watson wrote:I don't really understand the motivation for putting this kind of
functionality into gdb. Any GUI that is more than just a front-end
for gdb will most likely have an internal data structure representing
the value of the variable, and can retain or manage access to the
value if required. It seems to me that adding functionality like this
to gdb just adds to bloat when it is really a GUI function anyway.
Disclaimer: I've already talked with Vladimir about this at length and if I remember right he's the one who persuaded me that GDB was the right place to do it. After this I'll let him speak for himself.
Why should the GUI have a separate data structure for the value in a manipulatable form? I suspect that some GUIs only keep it around as a string, for display. Then if the user wants a radix switch, the easiest way is to tell GDB (-var-set-format).
The overall utility of -var-update * is somewhat suspect, I think,
since it can take so long to run; to make it practical you'd have to
delete varobjs for things not currently on-screen. But as long as that
functionality exists, we figured it would be nice to not break it.
The read-sensitive values that Vladimir alluded to are our ultimate
goal here and you'll be seeing rather more of them in the next
few weeks. Whenever we've suggested to a customer that our Eclipse
ought to pop up a window that shows all of their target's peripheral
I/O registers, the response has been jumping-up-and-down enthusiastic.
But without some solution for this problem we just can't do it. Having
that window pop open, acknowledge all your pending interrupts, and
steal one byte from each serial port FIFO, would be a real downer.
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