[cdt-dev] [DSF] FinalLaunchSequence extensibility

[Vladimir Prus <vladimir@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

because our product happens to support a lot of different debuggers,
including somewhat tricky ones, we've added a custom final launch
sequence that seriously modifies a couple of steps. The
remaining dozen and a half steps from standard FinalLaunchSequence
are perfectly OK, and we would like to reuse it, but it turns out
problematic. All the steps are defined like so:

	private Step[] fSteps = {
		new Step() { .... } ;
    }

So, even if I derive a class from FinalLaunchSequence, I cannot even access
any of the standard steps. Further, even if fSteps were private, accessing
predefined steps by index would be very brittle. Another approach is to
just copy-paste FinalLaunchConfiguration, but this is obviously not a
sound engineering.

Two solutions that would work are:

- Add protected members for each step of FinalLaunchSequence, e.g.:

	protected Step getTrackerStep = new Step() { .... } ;

- Add factory methods, e.g.:

    protected Step getTrackerStep() { .... } 

Then, both FinalLaunchSequence and derived classes can build a sequence
of steps easily.

Comments?

In fact, the above solution still has a problem -- if the order of steps
in FinalLaunchSequence ever changes, the derived classes have to be
updated too, and it's not easy to detect this case. I'd actually prefer
if names of members/methods be prefixed with the index of the step, e.g.
'_1_getTrackerStep', so that should order change (and members renamed to match),
the derived classes will stop compiling.

Comments? I'll be willing to work on a patch, provided there's definite agreement
on the acceptable direction.

Thanks,

-- 
Vladimir Prus
CodeSourcery
vladimir@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(650) 331-3385 x722