[Geany-devel] debugger plugin

[Dimitar Zhekov]

On Fri, 7 Jan 2011 17:17:01 +0300
Alexander Petukhov <Alexander.Petukhov at mail.ru> wrote:

> Hello, everybody.

Hi.

> Now i have GDB working more or less enough for using, and feel
> like I need some feedback.

Wow, a working, full debugger interface for Geany! At last! :)

> Waiting four your opinions and feedbacks.

IMHO, it should be included included in geany-plugins immediately after
plugins 0.20 release. The basic functions: Run, Breakpoint, Step,
Watches, Locals and Stack all work, though I had Step Into crash once.

Now a few remarks, in the order of appearance:

For some reason, all .[ch] files are marked as executable.

The plugin uses uses vte development files, at least <vte/vte.h>, but
configure does not check for them. Perhaps it would be possible, in the
future, to drop this dependency (Geany uses libvte directly), but this
is low priority, at least for me.

The preferences are currently empty. Obvious candidates are the
breakpoint / current line foreground and background (or maybe they can
be placed in a configuration file, like the highlighting settings).

Target -> Browse lists all files. The selection would be easier if only
the executables are shown, but I'm not sure if the gtk file chooser can
handle this.

Shortcuts are good, but a menu will be helpful too - for example, I
rarely use Stop, and prefer it unassigned to avoid accidentially
terminating a debugging session. In fact, I'd like "Debug" directly in
the main menu, after "Build", though other developers may oppose.

The breakpoint hit count does not seem to work, stays 0.

But these are all minor. The one thing that definitely feels
uncomfortable is that the display is scrolled on each step (very
distracting), and the current line is not even centered, but on about
1/3 of the height. This seems intentional?

Finally, thank you for the good work! Now I hope to drop nemiver soon,
since functions like "Load core file" and "Attach to running program"
are not really useful to me, while it's lack of shortcut preferences
and the different color scheme are inconvenient.

-- 
E-gards: Jimmy