Re: Incompatible change without "warning"

[Nick Roberts <nickrob@snap.net.nz>]

 >    I should also add that tooltip-gud-echo-area doesn't do exactly the
 >    same thing as tooltip-use-echo-area: it only uses the echo area for
 >    GUD tooltips.  Help messages are still displayed in their own
 >    tooltip frame. Previously using the echo area for GUD tooltips
 >    required help messages to be displayed there also.  Turning
 >    tooltip-mode off means that help messages displayed in the echo
 >    area and that GUD tooltips are no longer displayed. Maybe this
 >    change is not as good as I first thought because now it is not
 >    possible to have both GUD tooltips and help messages displayed in
 >    the echo area.
 > 
 > Why did you make that change?  It would seem that if people prefer to
 > have GUD tooltip texts displayed in the echo area, they most likely
 > also want help messages displayed there.

When tooltip-mode is off help messages are displayed in the echo area. It was
confusing and a bit redundant that tooltip-mode turned on and
tooltip-use-echo-area set to t would also display help messages there.

GUD tooltips are generated differently to normal tooltips whose message are
embedded in the text properties. Their display is more erratic and thats why
I thought it might help to display them in the echo area.

There are six cases to consider:


                              Normal

                      Own Frame | Echo Area              Behaviours

   None                   x          x                 x - previous and present
G
U  Own frame              x                            * - previous
D
   Echo area              +          *                 + - present


The asymmetry arises becauses help messages can't be suppressed like
GUD tooltips. I don't think an extra variable to deal with the extra
case is justified. I can revert the change if people prefer the old
behaviour/can't think of a more elegant solution.

As an aside, at some stage in the future I would like to extend GUD tooltips
to display #define directives over identifiers (like in Visual Studio, I
think) when the program is not executing.

Nick