Re: Insight and breakpoints

[Keith Seitz <kseitz at firetalk dot com>]

Owen Savill wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I have been using Insight, with varying degrees of success, for a while
> now. It has always troubled me that breakpoints can't be set while the
> program is running. I now discover that Code Medic can set breakpoints on
> the fly. Will we be seeing this feature in Insight ?

The problem is not that Insight cannot insert breakpoints while the
inferior runs. Rather, it is gdb (the "backend") that cannot do this...

In order to do this sort of thing, gdb would have to be taught how to do
this. Specifically, gdb would have to stop the inferior, insert the
breakpoint, and then continue the inferior. This may not be difficult,
but with the way gdb (and Insight) is architected, I'll bet this would
be more difficult than not.

Of course, the other problem is that not all targets can be interrupted
-- monitor and other remote/stub targets, in particular. We would need
to start tracking the abilities of every target interface in order to do
this. (This is pretty easy when you only have a handful of targets; not
quite so easy for all the targets -- and interfaces -- that gdb
supports.)

Of course, we in gui-land have always wanted gdb to maintain a list of
target/interface features so that we could enable/disable GUI features
at runtime... It would be one step closer to getting rid of Insight's
(ugly) "target database" in targetselection code. :-)

In short: ask about this on the gdb list and don't expect to see this
added anytime soon. :-(

Sorry,
Keith