Re: CLI and GDB/MI documentation patch

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz at gnu dot org>]

> Date: Fri, 12 May 2006 14:37:23 -0400
> From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
> 
> So, for someone who must support multiple versions of GDB, they would
> have to read NEWS looking for changes, find the new behavior in the
> current manual, and find the old (hopefully documented) behavior in the
> old manual?

No.  I propose to have a special section devoted to incompatible
changes in the remote protocol, and another one for incompatible
changes in MI.  Thus, no searching is necessary.

As for old behavior, since the old versions of protocol/MI is already
supported by the tools whose authors are the audience of these NEWS
sections, I'd expect them to be well acquainted with the old behavior.
So I don't think they will need to look for that.

> Our current NEWS is basically bullet-points.  That would definitely
> need a change.

Yes.  We will have to subdivide into sections.

> OK, reasonable enough, I suppose, although it seems
> awkward when we know that many of the people reading this chapter in
> the manual will be interested in precisely this historical information.
> 
> Many shipping GDB frontends work on any version of GDB released in the
> last several years and shipped by a large package distributor; that's a
> lot of versions of GDB.  I'm not sure the two cases are readily
> comparable, though I realize that Emacs LISP programs probably have
> similar issues.

If you feel we should tell how to create a front end and/or a stub
that supports several versions of GDB/MI or remote protocol, that's
fine by me, but let's have sections whose focus is to provide tips to
such programmers, not to tell the history of MI or the protocol's
evolution.  That's quite a different attitude than what Bob wrote.