Re: [RFA] Fix too many "no debugging symbols found" warnings.

[Doug Evans <dje at google dot com>]

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 11:02 AM, Pedro Alves<pedro@codesourcery.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 01 July 2009 18:52:50, Doug Evans wrote:
>> Does anyone have any other concerns with the patch?
>
> Does this mean that there will be no way anymore to say
> that you don't want symbol loading info? ?I was assuming
> we'd still have that option. ?:-/
>
> I find "set print symbol-loading-warnings" a bit
> misnamed, since this isn't about *all* warnings. ?In fact,
> it's about *no* symbols. ?I don't really want to get
> bishedy, but, why was it that keeping the existing
> option and adding a new one wasn't good?
>
> set print symbol-loading on|off
> set print no-symbols-found-warnings on|off

First, there's a bit of history here.
I added "print symbol-loading" to be able to turn off the "no
debugging symbols found" verbosity, but it wasn't working out the way
I wanted - it was all or nothing when what I really wanted was a way
to turn off the verbosity for automatically loaded libraries (for
which there can be 100's or even >1000) and not, for example,
executables, or anything manually done from the command line (one can
think of executables as falling in this category).

Secondly, it's not clear to me that users would ever want to turn off
messages for things they do from the command line.  i.e. "if
(from_tty)" is a sufficient check for these particular messages and
that's what 6.8 does (well, it also tests info_verbose).  I realize
scripts might cause an excess of verbosity from command-line related
symbol loading, but I don't know of any existing examples of that, so
I didn't want to keep two options if just for that.

Thirdly, symbol-loading-warnings is a compatible renaming of
symbol-loading - any distributions that have already shipped "print
symbol-loading" will see a minor change in behavior in 7.0 but nothing
will break.  [I realize this isn't a strong argument to some.  I don't
have a strong opinion on the option name choice, I just mention it as
it did factor into the choice.]

Fourth, gdb doesn't print symbol loading messages if (!from_tty &&
!info_verbose).  Except for the "no debugging symbols found" warning,
"print symbol-loading" doesn't apply unless either of those flags are
true (in current cvs).

Fifth, in the past I've observed pushback on unnecessary options, and
so here I was trying to "go with the flow".

Put this all together and that's why the patch is the way it is.

Ultimately, I don't have a strong opinion on having both options.  I
do have a strong opinion on providing an option to the user to let
them turn off the "no debugging symbols found" message (and other such
messages) from automatically loaded libraries.

Thoughts?