Summer of Code 2009: Emacs project suggestion

[R. Bernstein]

Nick Roberts writes:
 > Hi,
 > 
 > It's probably early days but, assuming GNU will participate in Google's
 > Summer of Code 2009, I would like to suggect the project below for Emacs.
 > I have contacted the Emacs maintainers on address@hidden and they
 > are agreeable to the idea.  I am willing to act as project mentor.
 > 
 > Nick
 > 
 > Emacs
 > ----- 
 > 
 > To migrate the GDB graphical interface in Emacs to completely use GDB/MI 
 > (GDB's
 > Machine Interface).  Currently the underlying lisp package, gdb-ui.el, uses a
 > mixture of annotations and GDB/MI to interact with GDB.  Annotations are 
 > being
 > deprecated and GDB/MI provides a more robust interface, as well as supporting
 > the new features of GDB.  There is currently a package called gdb-mi 
 > available
 > from the Emacs Lisp Package Archive (http://tromey.com/elpa) that fully uses
 > GDB/MI but does not have all the features of gdb-ui.el.  It could be used as 
 > a
 > starting point and, if the project is successful, it is anticipated that the
 > resulting code would replace gdb-ui.el after the release of Emacs 23.1.  See
 > http://users.snap.net.nz/~nickrob/ or post to address@hidden for more
 > information.
 > 
 > 

Something related to this. A while back Anders Lindgren and I (but
mostly Anders) started working on debugging support in emacs for other
languages, Ruby in particular. See
http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-debug/ The Emacs code is bundled in
ruby-debug-extra (See http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=1900). We
hooked into and used parts of gdb-ui.el, but ultimately it would be
nice to see some of that and parts of what's in ruby-debug-extra
merged and bundled on its own. This core code would be independent of
front-end for specific languages and specific back end debuggers.

Of the debuggers I've worked on that have emacs interfaces
(ruby-debug, pydb, bashdb, zshdb, kshdb, and remake mdb) none of them
support the MI interface only because it looked more complicated and I
couldn't find a nice succinct description of it. Right now some of
them have bastardized "annotation" interface.

But I'm currently redoing pydb from the ground up and in the spirit of
ruby-debug will allow for pluggable "interfaces" one of which could be
a MI interface.