design choices for a loadable module interface

[Nicolas Williams]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 11:50:11PM -0400, Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote:
> --On Tuesday, June 29, 2010 04:15:11 PM -0500 Nicolas Williams
> <Nicolas.Williams at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> >If you're using dynamic linking at all then there's no difference in how
> >hard it is to set such breakpoints in either scheme.  If you don't agree
> >then please explain in detail.
> 
> In gdb I can set a breakpoint on a symbol in a dynamic object that
> has not yet been loaded, such as a plugin.  The debugger will defer
> the symbol lookup until an object is loaded containing that symbol,
> which is extremely convenient.
> 
> It is easy to break on foo_do_something() even though the plugin foo
> has not been loaded.  It's rather harder to break on the plugin
> foo's do_something() if every plugin has a function by that name.

Is it really harder?  I use dbx, and in dbx we have a way to name
modules.  Surely gdb has the same feature!  It's just a matter of typing
the right sequence of characters, and it's going to be very similar in
both cases.  So I see nothing here distinguishing one solution from the
other.

Nico
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