Re: RFA: Document conventions for terminating query/set packet names

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at false dot org>]

On Wed, May 03, 2006 at 12:50:59PM -0700, Jim Blandy wrote:
> 
> 2006-05-03  Jim Blandy  <jimb@codesourcery.com>
> 
> 	* gdb.texinfo (General Query Packets): Document conventions for
> 	terminating packet names, and their violations.

Sorry, forgot to mention something when we talked about this earlier. 
I'm generally in favor of the newly documented conventions, except for
this:

> + Since this packet's name (@code{qP}) is not separated from its first
> + argument (@var{mode}) by any kind of punctuation, it is ambiguous with
> + the @code{qPart} packet.  Stubs should recognize this packet by the
> + twenty-four hex digits that follow.  New stubs should implement the
> + @code{qThreadExtraInfo} packet instead.
> + 

Background for the list: we discovered by accident yesterday that
RedBoot interprets any other query packet starting with qP as a
malformed thread info request.  Not surprising, since the format of qP
doesn't have any separators in it.  So what's a "malformed qP packet"
versus "some other packet that happens to start with qP"?

I think the best solution would be to document that new packets should
not start with "qP" or "qL", and rename the relatively new qPart packet
to something else, like qXfer.  I don't really care whether GDB
continues to try the old qPart name; I think it may be recent enough
that we can drop it, but maybe not.  I believe the only thing it's used
for on HEAD is the ELF Auxv vector; I have other uses on various
branches, but none of them have been merged yet.

Interested in any comments...


-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery