Re: Minor gdb-ui patches to make it a bit more robust

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> The flexibility of the command line means that there are always ways round
> these types of checks.  For example, the prompt can be changed, e.g when

Of course, I'm not deluding myself: these are nothing more than sanity
checks, but they can come *real* handy to the user.  I wasted a good 10
minutes trying to understand why my GDB was not responsive.

>> Also I think a good way to make it more reliable would be to make
>> it work with several gud buffers by moving most global vars to
>> process properties, so they're necessarily correctly initialized, and
>> we'd be forced to think a bit harder about what's going on where.

> I'm not familar with process properties but I trust your judgement to
> make these changes.

Process properties are nothing magical: they're just a property-list
attached to processes, that you can set and read via process-put and
process-get.  Handy for variables which are really per-process
(e.g. the yet-to-be-processed process output that needs to be passed
from one invocation of the process filter to the next).

> Bear in mind, though, that the (long term) plan is to move away from
> annotations and fully use GDB/MI.

I don't see in what way that would make any difference: global variables
will still be a source of bugs (and will still prevent the co-existence
of multiple gdb-ui processes in the same Emacs instance).

>> PS: Is there any hope for GDB to accept a command that puts it in
>> annotate=3 mode, rather than having to tweak the command line for it?
>> That would solve a lot of those problems.

> Yes, if you mean "set annotate 3".

So is there any hope to make gdb-ui rely on that rather than
on --annotate=3?


        Stefan