Re: [MI] -stack-list-variables

[Vladimir Prus <vladimir at codesourcery dot com>]

On Monday 21 September 2009 Joel Brobecker wrote:

> > > But what would happen the day a front-end starts caring? Are they
> > > going to have to send 2 MI commands to get the info?
> > 
> > No. The frontend author would write an email to gdb@sources.redhat.com,
> > explaining the reasons, and a new field will be added as result. That's
> > how I'd prefer MI to evolve, as opposed to adding information ahead of
> > the time.
> 
> This is just my 2 cents, of course, but Nick's suggestion to separate
> locals from arguments seems fairly reasonable. Why not add the field
> now, and make that feature available now, rather than later? 

Because we can always add a desired feature, but can never remove an unneeded
one, in fear that some frontend we have no idea about ended up using that
feature.

> I can
> certainly see why a front-end would want that separation. Seems like
> Nick, who AFAIK helps maintaining emacs/gud, would use it.

I am afraid I did not hear an explanation how that will be used. And as
recent MI pretty-printing saga clearly shown, new MI features really have
to be developed in lock-step with frontend changes.

(If you did not follow, the story was that I've drafted some MI interface
for pretty-printing, and them as soon as I've tried to use it from KDevelop,
the interface turned out to be totally lacking).

- Volodya