Re: [PATCH v2] Events when inferior is modified

[Nick Bull <nicholaspbull@gmail.com>]

On 25 November 2013 09:48, Phil Muldoon <pmuldoon@redhat.com> wrote:
> On 18/11/13 12:39, Nick Bull wrote:
>
>> This patch adds new observers, and corresponding Python events, for
>> various actions on an inferior: calling a function (by hand),
>> modifying registers or modifying memory.
>
> Thanks just a few nits and some questions. I did not see tests for
> these, and also, documentation?  In any case, both are needed.

Phil,

Thanks for looking at this. All the nits make sense, and I'll fix them and
add tests.

> I'm kind of on the fence about the inferior_altered naming.  A lot of
> things can alter an inferior which would make this a very broad event
> category. Like single stepping I would consider altering the inferior.
>
> With your memory changed event, would it fire on a breakpoint
> insertion? GDB does a lot of installing/uninstalling of breakpoints
> behind the scene in the inferior.
>
> Also, it would be super if we could split up the register
> and memory events with read/write events.  What do you think?

I'm going to revise the memory change event to use the existing
memory_changed observer, which I had overlooked because it doesn't
have a Python event. It's closer to what I wanted anyway, which is
to track only modifications to the program that are made explicitly by
the GDB user.

Given this I would give it a separate MemoryChangedEvent type so
that the name matches the corresponding observer. Then the other
events would be RegisterChanged and InferiorCall.

I suppose we might want to somehow distinguish that these events are
about explicit changes to program state rather than the 'behind-the-scenes'
work that GDB does, in case we ever want to create events of the
latter type. But I don't have any great suggestions for names just now.

Nick