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python and structured output
- From: Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>
- To: Project Archer <archer at sourceware dot org>
- Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:30:46 -0600
- Subject: python and structured output
- Reply-to: Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>
I've been thinking for a while about a way to reuse the ui_out machinery
in gdb to get structured Python objects as output from gdb commands.
This in itself is easy enough to do, but documenting it seems hard. I
recently hit on the idea of reusing MI commands -- and thus MI
documentation -- do accomplish this.
The full plan would be something like this:
* Write a new ui_out object that creates Python objects.
* Make a few new Python modules: gdb.mi1, gdb.mi2, gdb.mi3 (and an alias
gdb.mi). Each module would export all the relevant MI commands to
Python. The commands would have to be renamed a little, to account
for MI/Python syntax differences.
* All the functions would share a single implementation, which would
convert its arguments to strings, install a new python ui_out object,
and then call the underlying MI command.
It is possible that we'd need some changes in the MI code to make this
as nice as possible. I am not sure.
* Ideally we would not have to register all these new Python commands
ahead-of-time, but rather do lookups on demand.
I think we'd still need some kind of event module, a la Oguz's work, to
deal with inferior state changes.
This approach is not quite as nice as custom API for each module -- and
we would still need that in places -- but it would open up a lot more of
gdb with little effort.
Tom