> From: Richard Stallman <[email protected]> > Cc: [email protected], [email protected] > Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:21:21 -0500 > > GUD is a part of Emacs core. > Why do we have a package which is a modified version of GUD? > If changes in GUD are desirable, why not install them in GUD itself?
AFAIU, Realgud is not a modified version of GUD, it's a complete rewrite from scratch of the debugging front-end. Unless I'm mistaken in the above, there's no way of installing its many improvements in GUD except by someone implementing some or all of those features in GUD. Or maybe it would be possible to obsolete gud.el and add Realgud to the Emacs core instead. I don't use any external debuggers except GDB, and for using GDB, from my POV as both a user of GDB and a maintainer of Emacs, there's one significant disadvantage in Realgud: it uses the GDB annotations for the interface between Emacs and GDB. Annotations are deprecated in GDB since version 5.1 (which was released more than 20 years ago), and the GDB developers can decide to remove it from GDB at any moment. The GDB/MI interface, which replaced the annotations (and is used by the modern Emacs GDB front-end gdb-mi.el) is AFAIK not supported by Realgud.
