Using XML in GDB?

[Mark Kettenis]

> Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:57:44 -0500
> From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.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.

Does that hold for slow serial links too?

> 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?

No objection to using a well-standardized format, but that probably
only makes sense if you're not going to write your own parser.  And I
really would like to avoid making GDB dependent on a library that
isn't standardly available on all systems we support.

Mark