gud.el organization and adding debuggers

[Nick Roberts]

 ...
 > In order to get capabilities for the menu items that gud
 > doesn't think your debugger will have (like "up") and disable features
 > that gud thinks your debugger *must* have (like "stepi"??), one needs
 > to do something additional.

gud-stepi is only enabled for gdb and dbx.  Why do you have to disable it?


 > So in this scenario to add a new debugger you copy a *file* rather
 > than a section of this file and *forget* to modify that
 > gud-menu-map. And along with this, I guess I'm also suggesting that
 > instead of listing all of the debugger capabilities in the
 > easy-mmode-defmap gud-menu-map, the capabilities would be added in the
 > individual debuggers.

As always, it might be a bit more complicated than you think.  For example,
there are currently 2 modes for GDB (3 if you include one distributed with
GDB).

 > Some other miscellaneous remarks. I note that in gud.el CVS more
 > gud-menu-map items have been added. Excellent! One of them is "run",
 > but I note that most of the time it is nil. I'm assuming "run" means
 > the gdb "run" command, which I think would better be called "restart".
 >
 > If gud's "run" is supposed to indicate something else, then given it's
 > not used all that much even in gud, 


I think you're confused.  nil just means there is no keybinding, not that
its not used.  It just appears on the menu bar and tool bar.

 >                                    then I'd suggest renaming it to
 > mean "restart" or adding a "restart" menu item. bashdb for example has
 > such a command, so does gdb, perldb, mdb, and pydb. In other words,
 > restarting is a pretty common thing you might want to do.

GDB's run command *is* the restart command.  You could rename gud-run
to gud-restart but I think that would be confusing (GDB is the principal
debugger for GUD).  What should I add for basdb?  The following?

  (gud-def gud-run    "restart"      nil    "Start/restart the program.")

 > The other menu items that I've added to my debuggers is 
 > 
 > * something to show a stack trace -- gud-where with key T which is
 >   what perldb, mdb, pydb and bashdb use.

Do you mean in a separate buffer?  GDB does this now.  If you can do this
with other debuggers e.g bash that would be good but you need to be careful
about updating.

 > * something to toggle line tracing
 > 
 > - - - 
 > 
 > "local-set-key [menu-bar debug up]" is used in the various
 > debuggers. On my GNU Emacs 21.4.1 (GNU/Linux) with X Windows, I am not
 > aware of any evidence of menu-bar in the display. Where is it?

On GNU Emacs 21.4 gud-up should be visible with gdb, dbx, and xdb.  If you
can't even see the menu bar, what happens if you do menu-bar-mode?


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