Re: [PATCH]: add set/show debug, move gdb debugging flags into it

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz at delorie dot com>]

> I'm perfectly willing to document them, but personally, i don't think
> they *should* be documented.

I cannot disagree more.  I think there should be no undocumented
commands.  There are at least two good reasons for that:

  - You never know how useful can a command turn out to be, for
    someone, somewhere.  What you devise as the sneakiest, dirtiest,
    for-wizards-only trick, might well enough turn out to be the
    hottest feature on the block, if someone finds a creative way to
    use it in some situations.

  - We, the maintainers of GDB, need a quick way of finding out about
    the debugging features when we need them.  GDB is a very large
    program, and it's unreasonable to expect every maintainer to know
    every command on every architecture.  And new maintainers are
    joining the ranks from time to time.

> In general, with those debug commands, if you can't figure out what
> they do based on the one sentence docstring, you shouldn't be touching
> them.

There's no efficient means in GDB to search the available commands
using the doc strings.  There's nothing like Emacs' apropos or finder
commands (or at least I don't know about them--perhaps they are
undocumented ;-).  Heck, the "help" command doesn't even
auto-complete!

This makes the manual the only way to find about commands pertinent to
a given subject (assuming it's indexed appropriately).

> It's hard to say more about what "target debugging" is, except that it
> enables printing of target debug info.

Give a couple of examples.  Show sample output.  Describe one or two
cases where you'd need such a command.  (After all, you worked on it
because you needed to use it, right?)  This is usually enough info,
since we are talking about commands for GDB maintainers.

> They shouldn't find out they exist, unless specifically instructed by
> someone.

Who would that someone be?  I don't have anyone to instruct me how to
debug GDB, and I don't think the good-willing people here have enough
time to do that.  I only have the manual, the sources, Grep and etags.

In any case, IMHO using the docs locally is a much more efficient way
of solving problems than asking on the net.