Using XML in GDB?

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at false dot org>]

Hi folks,

I've spent the last week and a half working on the "target available
feature" interface that I described on this list last May.  A big chunk
of the last two days has been spent trying to nail down a useful format
to store (in files) and transfer (over the remote protocol) descriptions of
remote "features", especially their register sets.

At first I was primarily focused on compactness.  But I've got a pretty good
handle on that problem now; a well-defined naming scheme and some caching,
and the size of the data is no longer a major concern.  That leaves
expressibility, parsability, and extensibility.  At which point I eventually
asked myself why I was reinventing the wheel.

And we get all sorts of things for free; for instance, UTF-8, which will be
handy if someone ever wants to include internationalized descriptions in the
target description.

Does anyone have a good reason why GDB should not make use of this
well-standardized format instead of inventing additional ad-hoc formats?

Where appropriate, of course.  People sometimes use XML for the silliest
things.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery