Package: libdevel-gdb-perl (2.02-4)

module to open and communicate with a gdb session

The Devel::GDB package provides an interface for communicating with GDB. Internally, it uses the GDB/MI interpreter (see http://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb_25.html), which accurately informs the caller of the program state and, through the use of tokens, guarantees that the results returned actually correspond to the request sent. By contrast, GDB's console interpreter returns all responses on STDOUT, and thus there is no way to ensure that a particular response corresponds to a particular request.

Therefore, it is obviously preferable to use GDB/MI when programmatically interacting with GDB. This can be done via the send_cmd family of functions (send_cmd, send_cmd_excl, and send_cmd_async). There are, however, some cases when there is no GDB/MI command corresponding to a particular console command, or it has not yet been implemented (for example, -symbol-type, corresponding to the console command ptype, is not yet implemented as of GDB 6.6). In this case, the get function provides a workaround by capturing all output sent to the console stream.