Suggestion/Offer

Suggestion/Offer

[nick]

Hello,

I would like to write a mode for emacs that allows it to act as a GUI for gdb
using GDB/MI. Currently (GNU) emacs only uses `gdb -fullname' in gud.el.  I
would like to extend ideas used in gud.el for xemacs written by Cygnus Support
using annotations which is, apparently, now deprecated. It would be along the
lines of the Totalview debugger : there would be no command line interpreter,
clickable stack traces, breakpoints etc. Totalview has an excellent interface
that only uses a basic widget set (at least up till version 4) which I think
could be copied using GDB/MI when the specification is complete.
 
The mode which I have in mind would only work with gdb (and not dbx, xdb etc)
so it would be less general. It should, however, allow much tighter
integration with emacs especially since GDB/MI could be specified with emacs
in mind. The shift to GNU/Linux in recent years also makes the Unix debuggers
less important.

I would appreciate any feedback, positive or negative, that you may have to
these ideas.

Thanks

Nick Roberts

Re: Suggestion/Offer

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Mon, 25 Mar 2002, nick wrote:

> I would like to write a mode for emacs that allows it to act as a GUI for gdb
> using GDB/MI.

Thanks.  FWIW, I think it's a good idea (and the Right Way of 
communicating with GDB).

It is better to move this discussion to emacs-devel@gnu.org, though.

Re: Suggestion/Offer

[Richard Stallman]

I like this idea very much.  Please do not think in terms of slavishly
imitating any other debugger; rather, try to design the best way to
introduce these features into Emacs and make them fit in well with the
other features of Emacs.

We could add some new low-level features to Emacs for this, if
implementing them is feasible.  I added the overlay-arrow feature
for the sake of gud.el, way back when.