[Wine] Debugging and userfriendliness

[whatbug]

I've been playing this MMORPG (Mabinogi if anyone cares) for a while and it worked alright in Wine for the longest time (it still had some issues mostly because it was stupidly using Internet Explorer for so much of it..) until Hackshield updated and decided to throw the 0x00000108 error when initializing.
So I figured I'd give the debugger a shot and try to figure out the issue to get back to playing.

The normal debugger is a pain. I don't even care that it's a terminal application, but there doesn't seem to be any possibility of automatically passing or skipping certain exceptions, or even general ones. So trying to get the debugger past the game's launcher is impossible. It throws so many attempted read at memory 0x00000000 exceptions you can't make any progress.

So instead I tried logging. The page suggested to use +relay with a few other bells to get a good starting point of what was going on. Due to the sheer immensity of code that's executed before the error is thrown, actually logging the surrounding code is an absolute nightmare. The log was at 2 GB before even loading HSUpdate.exe then my computer crashed from memory shortage.

I saw a mention of a toggle button for logging, sounded like what I needed. But there were two problems: 1) It's not updated for the current Wine. 2) It does not work when pressing the button on windows of spawned processes, which is required here (and in this case, is actually spawned from the process spawned by the original). Because of the second I didn't really want to bother fixing the first. I don't know anything about Wine's code structure so I have no idea where to start fixing 2 (though I gave it a shot, it didn't amount to anything).

Finally, I logged "trace+all,-relay,-snoop,-heap" which was able to succeed, but doesn't give me the specific information I need...

Needless to say +relay would be really nice to use. So I want to suggest to the devs to put some effort into making a more user-friendly debugger. As much as I like Wine, I don't want to go through the effort of figuring out how to patch it according to all your regulations. I just want my game to work, I don't care what I have to modify to do it, be it Wine or Hackshield. But being able to more manageably figure out what's causing it would be a great help in making the strides to fix it.

To help I want to offer my suggestions to cover my debugging needs. Feel free to add suggestions yourself.

First of all for winedbg:
A shutup feature - Make it stop reporting, stopping, etc. all the crap it would normally do it on until told otherwise. So basically, run the application as it would without having run winedbg until otherwise noted.

exception handling list - Constant exception interrupts are the bane of my cracking existence. I recommend having a list similar to the win32 debugger in IDA Pro 5.5 (see screenshot: http://i44.tinypic.com/zjwkub.jpg) where you select the exception by code to either stop execution, pass it to the program, or ignore it.
I would use IDA's debugger for my purposes but it doesn't continue onto child processes.

For WINEDEBUG environment variable:
until - To replace the idea of a keypress toggle entirely, I suggest the until keyword alternative (or similar). My idea for it is something as follows: -relay,until+process/autoup\\.exe/
The [mostly failed] attempt in syntax here is to be fairly backwards compatible. I noticed that at least in the latest version, the class is ignored if it's not valid, still allowing -relay and +process to be set. Of course backwards compatibility would fail at that regex match after process..
What it's supposed to mean though, is that logging will be -relay until a log generated by +process matches the given regex, at which point the prior command would be inverted (-relay would become +relay).
This suggestion of implementation is probably no where near easy or feasible, it's only meant as a stepping stone to the idea of needing some form of programmable delay to logging.

HELP: Wine really REALLY needs some form of help command that can explain the debug channels. A lot are self explanatory, but then a lot aren't. Having the author or someone knowledgeable of the channel write a little blip on what kind of things it logs, or what it's used for would be invaluable to newcomers. As, as far as I can tell, there's no descriptive list of the channels anywhere.

+address: Log the address of the command being executed to form this log so people can reference it in a dissassembly of the program.

+jumps: Log jumps taken. This would help in finding what cmp/test is causing the jCC to the error so I can nop/jmp it as necessary. It's not a legitimate error in my case anyway, probably just some other "anti-hacking" technique that really only keeps you from running legitimate programs alongside the damn thing.


And lastly, some kind of debug config tool would be super nice. In similar style to the winecfg. It would just bring together all the obscure registry edits and flags and crap that goes into debugging, with a nice little run box and file selector for both the executable and the log file.

Thanks for hearing me out, and I hope to god debugging gets more friendly over time. :]