Re: What's an annex? stratum?

[Paul Koning <pkoning at equallogic dot com>]

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Blandy <jimb@codesourcery.com> writes:

 Jim> Well, let me try again to say what I meant: if you're new to
 Jim> GDB, you should not start by reading gdbint.texinfo.  Instead,
 Jim> start by reading and grepping, and then experiment by debugging
 Jim> GDB with itself.  If you ask a question, people may occasionally
 Jim> refer you to gdbint.texinfo.  But it's not useful as a getting
 Jim> started guide for GDB hackers, and I think the effort required
 Jim> to make it so is far more than any of us have available.

 Jim> I'm even a little skeptical about the value of internals
 Jim> documentation at all.  It seems to me that explanations like
 Jim> that belong in the code, where people are more likely to see
 Jim> them, keep them up to date, and delete them when appropriate.

That's really unfortunate.  Comments in code are useful but they are
no substitute for properly written internals documentation.

By contrast, the internals documentation of GCC seems to be pretty
helpful and reasonably up to date.

Given a program as complex and inscrutable as GDB, if the best you can
tell newcomers is "use the source, Luke", you're going to turn off a
lot of them.  Only those who are extremely motivated will make
progress against such a barrier.

For example: Bug #186 has been troubling us on and off for a long
time.  I would like to fix it.  But given that this involves going off
into the deep jungle of the GDB symbol and type machinery, and the
fact that there is no useable documentation for this stuff, I haven't
been able to do this.

	 paul