Re: Using XML in GDB?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz at gnu dot org>]

> Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2006 13:04:29 -0500
> From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
> 
> The proposal I sketched out in May is indeed simple.  The bits with
> "architecture-specific data" and "registers tags" are the only hints
> that it may need to evolve in the future.  However, there's a lot of
> other things which GDB would like to know about targets, in an ideal
> world.  A great example that GDB wouldn't make use of today, but
> could, is Andrew Stubbs' mention of memory maps paired with the recent
> report of backtrace blowing up on uclinux.  If we can receive the
> memory map from the remote stub, we can absolutely guarantee that we
> never send reads to outside of RAM when we wanted RAM access.

Can we at least have a pipe-dream list of things we think GDB would
ideally like to know about targets, and how structured each one of
them is?

> If we're going to do that, it would be a real shame not to consider
> localization; most ARM system programmers can probably manage the
> English names of the registers, but if we want to offer help text,
> being able to provide it in Japanese is a big win.  So that means
> character encodings, and in turn that means we need to be somewhat
> careful with the contents of descriptions.

That part is something I never understood in your reasoning: XML does
not do anything special to allow UTF-8, nor help you deal with the
resulting non-ASCII text on the GDB side.  If the underlying libc
supports UTF-8, you have that now; if it doesn't, you won't be better
off even if the target speaks XML.

> The biggest win of XML, for me, is that there are standard answers to
> all of these problems and standard tools for editing and
> checking XML files.

Is XML the only widely used standard that supports what we want?