James Hawkins wrote:
On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 2:09 PM, Chris Ahrendt celticht32@aol.com wrote:
I am sure there are some things that may be automated somewhat... or we can compare exceptions etc... that way we can get some idea of atleast what the hot bugs are at the time... Maybe one of the first tasks towards this is to improve problem determination... or debugging..
How do you propose to 'improve problem determination or debugging'?
-- James Hawkins
well you asked lol : My wish list would be:
1) Some form of a Standard Gui Debugger GDB integration / eclipse etc..
2) A way to select the debug flags used with an explanation of what each is for... +seh is for this +relay does that...etc....
3) When you do +relay you could open separate output for each thread or send the +relay output for each thread to a different pipe so we can then pipe that information to a file or open that pipe and use a tool to look at whats going on.
4) The ability to turn each of the +relay wine thread output on or off... Currently Wading through a relay log is a real pain and in some cases it prevents the problem from occuring. Time outs because of too much data being collected and then having to wade through and determine what to and not to turn off. A best practice somewhere showing the heavy hitters in a +relay log and turn them off by default. However, note somewhere saying if +relay doesn't give enough information then turn on just these flags and run. That way we are not managing flag lists when trying to figure out whats going wrong in an application. IMHO +relay is too unweldly and turning each flag on individually is as well, so there needs to be some sort of happy medium somewhere.
5) A window or output with a list of the important wine structures or resources that can be watched as the application runs with some explination of what those structures are for. And do the same with the dump. If the execution space is in an application output that fact. If we are in wine and we have the symbols of where we are then dump the code where we are too =)
6) Source code debugging in the GUI with step through, break points, etc..( not like now in winedbg but more like one of the GUI's mentioned before) and yes I know Gdb sort of works.. why not make it so it really works.. its not like I am asking to use VC++ to debug wine here lol.
7) Loading of application from gui debugger and then run it. This can be done with gdb now but its not the easiest in the world to do. This would be nice if it was made easier.
8) Ability to look at a stack and backtrace in the GUI or exception list and have the symbol associated with the backtrace placed in the execution trace.
9) Value Watches within the GUI.
10) Code Checking Some sort of bounds checking... Uninitialized variable checking.... Unreachable Code Checking (I think is being done to an extent with Dan's runs of valgrind)
11) Use the GUI to help enforce the Wine Coding standard.. most modern GUI environments let you specify a style of coding. This would help the new people understand and follow the coding standards set up... instead of guessing like they do now.
12) Online help / Context help... point to the IC in the wiki... lots of good stuff there... just hard to find sometimes....
13) Integration with bugzilla... they find a bug... they create it in the GUI.. dump out the screen, stack and the like... so some of the base information is collected instead of wasting time back and forth and having so many invalid bugs. Again this format can be enforced through coding style templates... you want to submit a bug here is what you do... check boxes to include things... like I said screen shots... logs, traces, variables, hardware config, etc...
14) Integration with GIT... check and see if there is a new tree out there.. if so... flag it and git it... (also update the GIT page with the latest instructions. Some of us are not GIT people by background... CVS, etc.. so there is a really steep learning curve and its easy to mess a local GIT tree up and have to reload.
15) Link to whats fixed in the new GIT tree... or a list of it... something off the main WINEHQ page that says ok here is 1.1.15 here is what we fixed...
16) Link to Dan's patchwatcher status... (kinda a workflow sort of thing) to know whats good and bad...
17) Generation of the GIT patch and then mail it to the list through a button...
You have to remember alot of the new people coming in are not old timers like some of us who grew up in a non-gui world.. Like it or not they are used to doing things in certain ways and I think we could get alot more people looking at bugs and helping fix them if we started thinking of something along these lines. This of course is not a complete list... But I think this might be a good next step for something like the summer of code people to do.. or whomever maintains the wine debugger to think seriously about. And no I am not criticizing wine in the least by the above. I really enjoy using wine and hacking around learning things. I want it to be the best it can be..
Chris