[Python-Dev] How to debug python crashes

[Philippe Fremy]

On 14/05/2013 14:49, Tim Golden wrote:
> On 14/05/2013 13:32, Philippe Fremy wrote:
>> I have a reproducable crash on Windows XP with Python 2.7 which I would
>> like to investigate. I have Visual Studio 2008 installed and I
>> downloaded the pdb files. However I could not find any instructions on
>> how to use them and was unsuccessful at getting anything out of it.
>>
>> I checked the developer guide but could not find anything on debugging
>> crashes. On internet, this seems to be also an underdocumented topic.
>>
>> So, a few questions :
>> - is there some documentation to help debugging crashes ?
> I don't think there is. As you say, it's somewhat underdocumented. Maybe
> someone else can point to something, but I'm not aware of anything.
But what's the reason for releasing them ? If you need to recompile
Python to use them, that would be strange because they are generated as
part of the compilation process anyway.

> Are you in a position to post a reproducible test case to the tracker?
> Or were you holding back until you'd done some analysis?

I can reproduce it systematically, with an open source project (I am
debugging winpdb) but this occurs in a middle of a multithreaded XML-RPC
server running a python debugger in another thread. So no, I don't have
a test case and identifying clearly the bug would make me a small and
happy python contributor.

cheers,

Philippe