Re: MI -break-info command issues

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz at gnu dot org>]

> From:  Vladimir Prus <ghost@cs.msu.su>
> Date:  Thu, 26 Jan 2006 10:01:43 +0300
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> >> The extra information doesn't pertain to breakpoint itself, it's gdb
> >> opinion on formatting and is hardly usefull for machine interface. IMO,
> >> of course.
> > 
> > This output is produced by the UI-independent output functions.  So
> > judging its usefulness from the point of view of a GUI is taking a too
> > narrow view.  The advantage of ui_out routines is that ....
> 
> I'm actually talking about MI *protocol*.

What ``protocol''?

> I think that usefulness of that
> should be judged from the point of view of its intended clients -- that are
> frontends, which nowdays means GUI. If MI is protocol specifically designed
> for some task, then it should not include some fields just because TUI
> needs those fields.

You may, of course, unilaterally decide that GDB/MI was (or should be)
meant for GUIs only, but that's not what it actually is about, as far
as GDB development is concerned.

> > whoever writes 
> > the code defines the layout once, and then each UI gleans whatever it
> > needs from the results.  The programmer who wrote the code does not
> > need to bother which UI needs what information.  Yes, that means some
> > of the info will be redundant or useless for certain types of UI, but
> > that's by design, and I think the advantages of a single interface far
> > outweigh the small annoyances of having to read and discard unused
> > parts of the output.
> 
> Why can't MI layer weed out unnecessary information?

And we are back to the beginning of this discussion, sigh...