Hello all bug exterminators,
Thanks to all who responded...
Robert L. McMillin
Marc Heinzmann
Petri Kallberg
Kazuro FURUKAWA
Gustavo Gibson da Silva
root ... who?
Alastair McKinstry
Kevin Oberman
Tom Barkanic
Jean Schuller
David Warren
Richard Renshaw
Jim Broderick
Bevin Brett
I'm sure that more responses will arrive after I've sent this so if I
am sorry if I have missed any names.
The suggestion include various GUI's for gdb of which the best is
probably ddd from...
http://www.cs.tu-bs.de/softech/ddd.
The amusing side of this is that my ftp site is the UK source for
this debugger. Unfortunately anything based on gdb is limited to gdb
features. This has been noticed by Mark Russell at the University
of Kent who has had a brilliant go at thinking the problem
through with ups, available from HENSA at..
http://www/hensa.ac.uk/pub/misc/unix/ups
Unfortunately support for f77 and DU does not appear to be complete.
One suggestion that caught me by surprise is Emacs GUD - the Grand
Unified Debugger which is really just running gdb in emacs shell
mode. I'm sure that this works well but is hardly the nicest GUI.
I had mail from three people who actually like TotalView, one of
these is from the DEC Galway site. For those who have not met this
before it is a parallel debugger that grew up in BBN, has a nice
GUI and has been licensed to Cray (now SGI) and bought by Dolphinics.
http://www.dolphinics.com
Their home page says that versions for DU will follow shortly so
I guess that Galway may have some special relationship with
Dolphinics. After all Dolphinics market an excellent product called
SCI (scalable coherent interface) which is serious competition to
DEC Memory Channel. But I digress. I have used TotalView on the
Cray T3D where its pet name is TotalCr*p, and justly so too. So
unless Dolphinics have fixed it I can't see myself paying almost
$1k a seat. (Hey - this is a University not a goldmine).
Mysterious root pointed out that we should turn off kdebug if
we want ladebug or dxladebug to work reasonably. But this
still doesn't fix the bad design.
If it wasn't for Bevin Brett I would become depressed at this point
but THANKS BEVIN! Not only do you realise what the problem is but
you seem to be doing something about it. If you teamed up with
Mark Russell and got the parallel debugging into fewer windows
you could end up with some pretty red hot software. So what did
Bevin say... well here is his response... all of it.
===============================================================
Hi, I saw some mail where you were expressing frustration with Ladebug.
Being incredibly frustrated with it myself, I took over the position of
project leader back in April, and have been trying to fix as much as
possible.
We have made a lot of progress on the non-gui since April, and have done
a few things to the d*mn useless GUI. Mostly we have given up on fixing the
gui from the current source base, and have started massively reengineering
it.
Meantime, you can make things a little better for yourself if
(1) You should be using the latest ladebug,
4.0-42 from gatekeeper
% ftp gatekeeper.dec.com
Name (gatekeeper.dec.com:username): anonymous
331 Guest login ok, send ident as password.
Password:
ftp> binary
ftp> cd /private/deccxx
ftp> get LDBversion-v?.?.tar ?.? is 3.0 3.2 4.0
ftp> quit
(2) You should make sure they have all the relevant kernal and threads
patches installed (see appendix) if you are debugging threaded
applications
You should make sure you are using latest C and C++ compilers
C++ 5.7 is ideal - it comes with the 4.0-42 kit included in it
(4) After you have done all this, then the command-line version is useable,
although far from ideal.
(5) The GUI is still awful. We are working on a major overhaul of it.
The above fixes do make a big improvement on ladebug's usability. We are
currently investigating the best way to make forward progress from where we
are.
/Bevin
Ladebug project leader
Patches
-------
The following Digital Unix patches clear up various Ladebug problems
that have been reported to us.
Customers can get these from
http://www.service.digital.com/html/patch_main.html
The following patches are strongly recommended.
***in all cases***
NEW PatchID: 91.00
PATCH ID: OSF410-053 SUBSET(s): OSFBIN410
New PatchID: 136.00
PATCH ID: OSF410-400239 SUBSET(s): OSFBASE410 OSFCMPLRS410
***if you are using AdvFS***
New PatchID: 128.00
PATCH ID: OSF410-400231 SUBSET(s): OSFADVFSBIN410 OSFADVFSBINOBJECT410
===============================================================
I hope that some of this is of use to someone.
Bye for now!
k.mcmanus_at_gre.ac.uk -
http://www.gre.ac.uk/~k.mcmanus
-------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Kevin McManus ||
School of Computing & Math Science ||
The University of Greenwich ||
Wellington St. Woolwich ||Tel +44 (0)181 331 8719
London SE18 6PF UK ||Fax +44 (0)181 331 8665
Received on Wed Sep 17 1997 - 17:33:26 NZST