GDB/MI is actually not a finished published protocol -- it's work in progress.
Unfortunately, frontend maintainers tended to read between the lines, and guess
the behaviour and accepted input instead of asking here. And in cases where what
they've read between the lines does not correspond to what GDB developers means,
the result is a buggy frontend :-)
Given that MI, presently, is still not adequate for such basic tasks as
listing local variables in a function, it will change, and it might break
things, and frontend developers should provide the input to avoid surprises.
You and Marc represent Eclipse here, and Nick represent Emacs, and
I represent KDevelop, so those three are fine, but other frontend developers
should be more active here.
Probably, I should add big warning to MI manual, saying that everything that is not
100% clear must be asked on the list.
- Volodya