[Development] new "debugsupport" module and API

[Koehne Kai]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: development-bounces+kai.koehne=digia.com at qt-project.org
> 
> we currently have several implementations of the QML debug protocol used
> to transmit data between a debugger or profiler and the application being
> debugged or profiled. I'm proposing a generalized "debugsupport"
> module to address various issues with those. In particular:
> [...]

First of all: I'm all for the idea of making the current protocol a properly exported API + using it for more than just QtDeclarative!

One thing Andre raised though was whether we should continue running our own (albeit improved) proprietary protocol, or try to integrate into / implement TCF:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/TCF

Just like our current infrastructure, TCF (Target Communication Framework)  allows you to announce & communicate with individual plugins. Being designed for embedded devices, the idea is that the Service Manager runs as a separate process on the device - that's different from our current approach, where the "server" is actually in-process. The protocol is also much more advanced (read: complicated) than what we've provided so far ... For one, everything is defined in JSON, while we happily send around QByteArray's so far.

I'm wondering how popular TCF is these days, and whether plugin into the TCF infrastructure/protocol would actually help our use cases. Can we e.g. plug in into an exising TCF server from inside the executable, to provide our own services?  And how would the setup be for desktop, where there's no default TCF server running? 

Maybe someone with more insight into TCF cares to comment on this :)

Regards

Kai