Re: Summer of Code 2009: Emacs project suggestion

[Nick Roberts]

[I'm not sure who address@hidden is but I've kept the cc. there]

Hi Rocky,

 > 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.

I'm aware of your work.  I'm happy that you are using parts of gdb-ui.el
but I'm not sure that our goals are the same.  I'm interested in specifically
getting GDB to work in Emacs.

 > 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.

MI is a bit ugly but that's because GDB is a complex beast.  The problem with
annotations is that it marks up output intended for a human to read.  That
means that the syntax might change at any time.  In contrast, MI is more formal
output intended for parsing by computers, that should provide a more robust
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.

I'm not sure that MI is appropriate for Python.  Are you just communicating
to me what you have done or are you saying something else?

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