Pretty-printers auto-loading and static libraries

[Pierre-Marie de Rodat]

John,

On 01/14/2015 03:21 AM, John Gilmore wrote:
> People who want to debug Ada programs with this pretty-printer can
> create a .gdbinit in their working directory, or in their home
> directory, that loads any pretty-printer that they want.

Yes, I am aware that automatic scripts loading features have security 
implications and I don't intend to introduce security breaches into GDB. 
The point is that GDB already has such auto loading facilities and ways 
to restrict them[1]. As far as I could see, these are even enabled by 
default on most distributions.

What I would like to do is to leverage this so that pretty-printers for 
Ada work out of the box, otherwise nobody will remember to use them (or 
will bother configuring things).

Besides, if I understand correctly, auto-loading pretty-printers, type 
printers and so on *only when useful* is important for performance 
reasons. If one has to configure GDB to load scripts for all the 
runtime/libraries he/she uses, this is going to make GDB's 
initialization longer and will likely make regular work longer because 
of lookups.

I also guess doing this would pollute the output for "info 
pretty-print", making it harder to enable/disable specific 
pretty-printers. I don't want to have Ada pretty-printers listed when 
I'm debugging some C++ only application. ;-)

[1] 
https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Auto_002dloading-safe-path.html#Auto_002dloading-safe-path

-- 
Pierre-Marie de Rodat