Re: Emacs .gdbinit incompatible with latest GDB

[Richard Stallman]

    the recent GDB has problems running GDB `xbacktrace' on EMACS
    http://sources.redhat.com/ml/gdb/2007-02/msg00252.html

It seems clear why the change was made:

        On the other hand byte arrays become unreadable if printed as strings.

However, it seems that their hope this would not bother anyone was based
on an assumption which is inaccurate:

      I hope nobody uses sign-specification for strings.

Which GDB behavior is better is a matter of how often each one is
convenient and how often it causes trouble.  I don't know enough to
have an opinion about that, but if neither one is clearly better
overall, it would be best to leave GDB the way it was.