[cdt-debug-dev] gdb and MI

[Tom Tromey <tromey@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Last week I was at the IBM CDT workshop (that's what I'm calling it; I
don't know if it had an official title) in Toronto.  While there we
talked, among other things, about the CDT debugger interface and
whether or not using gdb's MI mode is the best approach.

Since then I've talked to a couple of gdb developers and gotten what I
consider is the definitive response.  It seemed appropriate to share
that information here.  (I'm new to Eclipse development, so if this is
the wrong forum please tell me.)

For the record I talked to Andrew Cagney, who is the main gdb
maintainer, and to Keith Seitz, who is the Insight maintainer.
They've both worked on MI.

Basically as I understand it there are two big reasons to use MI and
not annotations:

* MI is defined.  There's a test suite and a contract.

* MI is supported.  Changes to annotations will be hard to get past
  the maintainers, whereas presumably MI changes will be easier.


One thing that was brought up at the CDT workshop was the problem of
interfacing to the CLI when in MI mode.  According to Keith there
really isn't a problem here.  Apparently MI was designed to pass
through any CLI command.  Perhaps I misunderstood the problem?

HTH,
Tom