Re: [RFA 01/08] multi-process support: struct inferior

[Stan Shebs <stan at codesourcery dot com>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> [...] we still need some introductory text to break the news on
> the reader that GDB can debug several inferiors at once.  A couple of
> use cases where this would be useful will not do any harm, either.
>
> IOW, people who debug programs usually do that one program at a time,
> so we cannot seamlessly start talking about commands that support
> multi-process paradigm without introducing the reader to the feature.
>   
At the moment, I'm working with a section "Debugging Multiple Programs" 
just in front of the "Running" / "Threads" section, plus there are bits 
about multiple executables in the "Invocation" chapter. I don't think we 
want to push it up too much further, because 99% of GDB users don't care 
about multiple whatevers, and we don't want to get them mired down in 
this new level of complexity. A pre-multi-executable version of this 
section could maybe just introduce the concept of inferiors and not say 
much more except that multiple inferiors can be created via certain 
targets, such as the remote protocol. We could title it "Inferiors" in 
the meantime, and yes, it will seem a little odd to have both that and a 
"Processes" section soon after, but as of yet I don't have a good feel 
for how to best to merge the two, and given the coming upheavals, I'd 
just as soon wait until the multi-exec bits come in.

Stan