Debugging Wine thoughts

Wed Sep 10 10:16:39 CDT 2008

Dan / All,
I think what the guy was asking on improving winedbg is to have some sort of visual debugger much like VC/C++ , Eclipse, 
Borland C++ or the like... Where you can step through the code (seeing the whole thing like any visual debugger).? 
Then when looking at stacks you? click on a variable or stack and it either winds it back or display's it.? 

Below is my thoughts on what would be a nice to have in some form of Debugger / Gui Debugger for Wine

So my wish list would be:
1) Some form of a Standard Gui Debugger
2) A way to select? the debug flags used with an explanation of what each is for... +sed is for this +relay does that...etc....?? 
3) When you do +relay you could open separate output windows for each thread 
4) The ability to turn each of the +relay wine thread output on or off... 
4) 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.
??? So a note or best practice somewhere showing the heavy hitters in a +relay log? and turn them off by default.? However, note 
??? somewhere saying? if +relay doesnt 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 with a list of the important wine structures or resources that can be watched as the application runs.
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)
7) Loading of application from gui debugger and run it
8) Ability to look at a stack and backtrace in the GUI
9) Value Watches within the GUI.
10) Code Checking
????? Some sort of bounds checking...
????? Uninitialized variable checking....
????? Unreachable Code Checking
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...
15) Link to whats fixed in the new GIT tree... or a list of it...
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...
18) GIT integration

You have to remember guy's 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... 
And I am sure this is going to start a flame war or something close to it.. 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.

Most of these things I think could be implemented using the current wine debugger with some form of pipe between it and the GUI.
That way the 'purists' can still debug using winedebug like now and the new people who choose to can use the GUI?

Thoughts????????????????????????????????

Problems I have noticed when debugging...
If I kill (press the X button or close it from the task bar) the wine application, Wine does not clean up from itself... it leaves the 
wine mount daemon running. so I have to kill all the wine processes before I can restart wine. Otherwise any windows 
application which loads another application fails to start IE a game with a loader which then starts the game (I have found this
in alot of MMO's where you have some form of login screen / loader which then loads in the actual game) (and no you cant
always just call the main exe)

Question :
Why does wine have to allocate all its memory at startup? re... the issue that is causing the ATI drivers to have such
a fuss....? why not just allocate as needed? or have the ability (if its not there already) to specify the total amount of memory
which is available to the wine process and limit wine to just that ammount of memory (kind of like the way most VM machines
have the option of setting the maximum amount of memory which is available).

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