SoftICE for wine

[Gerhard W. Gruber]

On Thu, 12 Jun 2003 18:51:52 +0200, Eric Pouech <pouech-eric at wanadoo.fr>
wrote:

>what didn't you like in gdb and winedbg ?

The interface is quite annyoing. A lot to type again and again. In pICE I have
all the relevant information at one glance. I was also thinking of adding user
space support, so that you can use pICE also as a normal debugger with a user
space GUI. I think there may be already some support for such a feature but I
didn't have time to look at all the code.
Also I didn't manage to get hardware breakpoints to work and I got no response
on my question about this.

>trying to port pice to wine would be rather an heavy task

I haven't thought it an easy task either. :) But this is something that might
interest me. Also I wasn't thinking of actually porting pICE to wine. Rather I
thought, if this is possible of course, to write something like a plug-in
mechanism, where wine could be supported through. I don't know if this is
possible or how much work this is yet. the advantage of such a system could be
to provide a debugger that may support other projects as well (like bochs).
Bochs is just an example. I know that they have some debugger support, but I
don't know how good it is and what it can do and what not.

>I don't really what you will gain with pICE

A much better user interface and also a more powerfull debugger (I assume)
than gdb is. I know that gdb is quite good and I work with it also but I don't
really like it. From the pointer of usabillity I think that i.E. Visual Studio
is much nicer and also SoftICE has a much better user interface. I can still
see the advantages of gdb's user interface so this is not an issue.

>I personnaly don't see an interest. It's already a burden to maintain 
>winedbg, so maintaining a second debugger doesn't seem right to me

You wouldn't have to maintain it because it is a seperate project. I was just
feeling out if there is interest (personally I have it) and what would be
needed in order to achieve this.

>ROS port uses a specific device driver, which will be fun to implement 
>in wine

Could you tell me a bit more about this?

>winedbg has been inspired by gdb, but it is not an extension of gdb (as 
>a standalone debugger). But, you're may be talking of the proxy feature 
>of winedbg which lets gdb talk to wine thru gdb's remote protocol

Ah. Because of this I thought that winedbg would be a frontend like wdb. Only
that it is no GUI frontend but a code frontend.

>Again, I don't see what pICE will bring you that you don't have in gdb 
>or winedbg. IMO, you should start by explaining this.

I hope that I answered this. :)

-- 
Gerhard Gruber

Für jedes menschliche Problem gibt es immer eine einfache Lösung:
Klar, einleuchtend und falsch. (Henry Louis Mencken)