Re: Data plugins for gdb...

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at false dot org>]

On Fri, Aug 08, 2008 at 01:23:35AM +0200, Ryan C. Gordon wrote:
>
> I spent a few hours hacking something out as a proof of concept; I'd  
> appreciate some opinions from those that know better.

Hi Ryan,

When it rains, it pours - people have complained about GDB's inability
to do this for years, and now it's showing up from all sides.

The GDB project (particularly Vladimir, Tom, and Thiago) is in the
process of adding Python support.  One of the intended uses is just
this same idea.  They're still designing the command-line interface
to it; I believe Thiago is currently looking into it.  Vladimir's also
made it work via MI, so that front-end GUIs can access this
functionality too.  There's more information on the PythonGDB wiki
page.

What I don't want is to have a bunch of different extensibility
mechanisms.  We've pretty much settled on Python, though of course you
can load C compiled plugins into the Python interpreter; Python just
provides the framework and the boundary.

Can I ask you to work with them?  I'm sure there's some of what you
have here that will fit nicely, e.g. the surface plugin, and more
hands are always welcome.

By the way, if you're interested in contributing to GDB (we hope you
are!) you'll probably need a copyright assignment form sooner or
later.  Let me know and I can send it to you.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery