Re: Minor gdb-ui patches to make it a bit more robust

[Nick Roberts]

 > Yes, I saw that.  You may want to keep the gdba alias, tho.

That's a good idea, so I've done it in EMACS_22_BASE.

 > Detecting a (gdb) prompt when we don't expect it is part of
 > defensive coding.  Maybe falling back automatically to gud-gdb is not
 > a good idea, but detecting the situation and signalling it to the user
 > is important.  There might be all kinds of reasons why the user failed
 > to provide the --annotate=3 argument.

The flexibility of the command line means that there are always ways round
these types of checks.  For example, the prompt can be changed, e.g when
debugging gdb,

set prompt (top-gdb) 

is used.

 > Also I think a good way to make it more reliable would be to make
 > it work with several gud buffers by moving most global vars to
 > process properties, so they're necessarily correctly initialized, and
 > we'd be forced to think a bit harder about what's going on where.

I'm not familar with process properties but I trust your judgement to make
these changes.  (In fact if Emacs was a democracy, I'd vote for you as
maintainer!).  Bear in mind, though, that the (long term) plan is to move away
from annotations and fully use GDB/MI.

 > PS: Is there any hope for GDB to accept a command that puts it in
 > annotate=3 mode, rather than having to tweak the command line for it?
 > That would solve a lot of those problems.

Yes, if you mean "set annotate 3".

-- 
Nick                                           http://www.inet.net.nz/~nickrob