Re: wishlist for gdb ....

[Vardhan Varma <vardhan at cadence dot com>]

Eli Zaretskii writes:
 > Please post a list of missing/buggy/wrongly-implemented features in
 > GDB that can substantiate this sentence.  (FWIW, my personal
 > experience with dbx leads me to the opposite conclusion.)

   Well 'the' feature i like in dbx ( and of the thousands of dbx,
i'm talking of SUNWspro 5.0's dbx ), is that the command line
interpreter is actually full blown ksh. So i can just do a ls or
cat, or even run pine fro (dbx) prompt.   Okay so in gdb you can
define 'define' for that, but we are talking of here a good ( okay
actually they have screwed up some things, in particular alias
handleing with arrow expressnion (a->b)  as parameters, but the
_idea_ (of bundling shell into cmd line) is pretty good. So i
can save all breakpoints using 'save -b > bp' and later reset them
using 'source bp'.
      i can even do shell things like a=`print foo+bar`, and later
      use $a etc. I can use both program variables and shell variables
      in expressions (with some tweak on ksh syntax )
      

      What is lacking in this(dbx) is, 
        tab-completions for variables and functions, 
        which is the reason i want to use gdb

 > >	   BTW, is there any effort to make a geniune components out
 > >	   of gdb( a libgdb.a/so with libgdb.g ?)
 >          Yes.
 > >          with tcl thingy
 > >	   cleany out of it , or is redhat going to make a spaghetti of
 > >	   code ?
 > 
 > It strikes me that such attitude is not the best way of encouraging
 > maintainers of a package to add features you want to be added, or even
 > to reply, for that matter.

   Sorry for steppin on anyone. But in gdb 5.0, the command line
option -w has scared me as to some severely tight integration of
gdb with tcl ( insight). Even --interpreter={tcl/tk/insight} would
have been okay, but this ( -w)  is scary. 


     BTW:
        zsh (www.zsh.org) has a nice dynamical loadble module system,
which can provide builtins and various functions ( e.g. zsh's command
line editrot -zle, and a ftp module zftp).  So i was just wondering if
libgdb.{a/so} breakup in a usable position, i may attempt a gdb
module for zsh. 


Just my thoughts, YMMW,  
 > 

-- 
Vardhan Varma <vardhan@cadence.com>  +91-118-4562842 Extn / VMail: 4123
Random Quote: I don't know the key to success, but 
the key to failure is to try to please everyone." - Philip Caldwell