GDB inferior I/O

GDB inferior I/O

[Fredrik Tolf]

Dear list,

I only recently upgraded to Emacs 24 (since Debian Testing only recently 
did that). I'm generally positive about the changes, but there's one thing 
that irks me a bit, namely the new handling of I/O with inferior GDB 
processes.

As I'm sure you're aware, Emacs 23 handled I/O with the debugged program 
in the same buffer and with GDB itself, while Emacs 24 now handles it in a 
separate buffer. I have two problems with this:

  * It uses an extra window when debugging, where I'd rather use that space
    for other things.
  * It switches to that buffer whenever a program being debugged in the
    background decides to print something. Since I often have a server
    process running in GDB in the background that outputs log messages with
    a few millihertz or so, it springs up randomly every now and then.

I solved the latter problem with a simple modification to the 
gdb-inferior-filter function, but I'm still working on a solution to the 
former problem. It seems to me that I could simply remove the following 
three lines from gdb-init-1:

   (gdb-get-buffer-create 'gdb-inferior-io)
   (gdb-clear-inferior-io)
   (gdb-inferior-io--init-proc (get-process "gdb-inferior"))

I feel like this is likely to have unintended side-effects, however. Is it 
safe doing that, or will it confuse the communication with GDB somehow, or 
something?

If there's no problem with this, I'll make a more proper patch of it with 
customization later and submit it.

Thanks for reading!

--
Fredrik Tolf