Debugging Wine thoughts

Wed Sep 10 13:17:12 CDT 2008

 Is there any documentation on the wine site how to set this up stefan???  It may be a start to what I am thinking..... 

chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Stefan Dösinger <stefan at codeweavers.com>
To: celticht32 at aol.com
Cc: wine-devel at winehq.org
Sent: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 11:32 am
Subject: RE: Debugging Wine thoughts

You can
attach any debugger to a Win32 process running in Wine. This includes Linux
debuggers like gdb, or any graphical frontends, as well as Windows debuggers
like visual studio. If you built wine from source, the Linux debuggers will see
the Wine source. Probably they can also read the Windows apps source if you
have it. I'm not sure if Windows debuggers can access the Wine source, but
maybe dbghelp.dll can do that

From:
wine-devel-bounces at winehq.org [mailto:wine-devel-bounces at winehq.org] On Behalf Of celticht32 at aol.com

Sent: Wednesday, September 10,
2008 10:17 AM

To: dank at kegel.com

Cc: wine-devel at winehq.org

Subject: Debugging Wine thoughts

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 no
w 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 th
e 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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