PR tui/16138 is about failure to initialize curses resulting in GDB

exiting instead of throwing an error.  E.g.:

 $ TERM=foo gdb
 (gdb) layout asm
 Error opening terminal: foo.
 $

The problem is that we're calling initscr to initialize the screen.
As mentioned in
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xcurses/initscr.html:

 If errors occur, initscr() writes an appropriate error message to
 standard error and exits.
                    ^^^^^

Instead, we should use newterm:

 "A program that needs an indication of error conditions, so it can
 continue to run in a line-oriented mode if the terminal cannot support
 a screen-oriented program, would also use this function."

After the patch:

 $ TERM=foo gdb -q -nx
 (gdb) layout asm
 Cannot enable the TUI: error opening terminal [TERM=foo]
 (gdb)

And then PR tui/17519 is about GDB not validating whether the terminal
has the necessary capabilities when enabling the TUI.  If one tries to
enable the TUI with TERM=dumb (and e.g., from a shell within emacs),
GDB ends up with a clear screen, the cursor is placed at the
bottom/right corner of the screen, there's no prompt, typing shows no
echo, and there's no indication of what's going on.  c-x,a gets you
out of the TUI, but it's completely non-obvious.

After the patch, we get:

 $ TERM=dumb gdb -q -nx
 (gdb) layout asm
 Cannot enable the TUI: terminal doesn't support cursor addressing [TERM=dumb]
 (gdb)

While at it, I've moved all the tui_allowed_p validation to
tui_enable, and expanded the error messages.  Previously we'd get:

 $ gdb -q -nx -i=mi
 (gdb)
 layout asm
 &"layout asm\n"
 &"TUI mode not allowed\n"
 ^error,msg="TUI mode not allowed"

and:

 $ gdb -q -nx -ex "layout asm" > foo
 TUI mode not allowed

While now we get:

 $ gdb -q -nx -i=mi
 (gdb)
 layout asm
 &"layout asm\n"
 &"Cannot enable the TUI when the interpreter is 'mi'\n"
 ^error,msg="Cannot enable the TUI when the interpreter is 'mi'"
 (gdb)

and:

 $ gdb -q -nx -ex "layout asm" > foo
 Cannot enable the TUI when output is not a terminal

Tested on x86_64 Fedora 20.

gdb/
2014-10-29  Pedro Alves  <palves@redhat.com>

	PR tui/16138
	PR tui/17519
	* tui/tui-interp.c (tui_is_toplevel): Delete global.
	(tui_allowed_p): Delete function.
	* tui/tui.c: Include "interps.h".
	(tui_enable): Don't use tui_allowed_p.  Error out here with
	detailed error messages if the TUI is the top level interpreter,
	or if output is not a terminal.  Use newterm instead of initscr,
	and error out if initializing the terminal fails.  Also error out if
	the terminal doesn't support cursor addressing.
	* tui/tui.h (tui_allowed_p): Delete declaration.

1 files changed, 14 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/gdb/ChangeLog b/gdb/ChangeLog
index 88c18e0..1125b1e 100644
--- a/gdb/ChangeLog
+++ b/gdb/ChangeLog
@@ -3,6 +3,20 @@
 	* tui/tui.c (tui_rl_switch_mode): Wrap tui_enable/tui_disable in
 	TRY_CATCH.
 
+2014-10-29  Pedro Alves  <palves@redhat.com>
+
+	PR tui/16138
+	PR tui/17519
+	* tui/tui-interp.c (tui_is_toplevel): Delete global.
+	(tui_allowed_p): Delete function.
+	* tui/tui.c: Include "interps.h".
+	(tui_enable): Don't use tui_allowed_p.	Error out here with
+	detailed error messages if the TUI is the top level interpreter,
+	or if output is not a terminal.	 Use newterm instead of initscr,
+	and error out if initializing the terminal fails.  Also error out if
+	the terminal doesn't support cursor addressing.
+	* tui/tui.h (tui_allowed_p): Delete declaration.
+
 2014-10-29  Joel Brobecker  <brobecker@adacore.com>
 
 	* arm-tdep.c (arm_skip_stack_protector): Return early if