Minimal debug/rep functionality

[Peter Hansen]

Delaney, Timothy wrote:
>>From: Peter Hansen [mailto:peter at engcorp.com]
> 
>>I'm looking forward to seeing your tool though, Timothy. :)
> 
> I'd love it to eventually become part of the core - I *expect* I'll be able
> to release it (but of course, it's up to my employer ...). It's doing
> everything I want now except for determining exactly which zero-count lines
> can be safely ignored (comments, multiline expressions). Oh - and I haven't
> got an actual "trace as you go" mode (which is the topic of this thread ;)
> but that will be easy to add. And I haven't got any path coverage analysis
> yet - the data is captured, but no analysis is performed. And it currently
> does a relatively primitive text-only coverage dump. And ... 

Heh. :-)

I'm a commercial Python user as well, so I can imagine the kinds of
things your employer think about whether to release or not.  We have
some items which we simply wouldn't consider releasing, but there
are a number of tools which we hope to release at some point.  They
have similar limitations to yours (well, okay, they're actually much
more primitive even than that :-) yet with a little more work they
would be useful to others.

More helpfully in convincing my own employer that we should release
back to the community is pointing out how with our limited resources
these tools will always remain primitive and simplistic.  If we can
do a little more work *and* release them, we stand a chance of seeing
them improved by others, and taking advantage of the improvements
ourselves.  See, it's easy to convince those conservative, selfish
minds that they can profit by giving things away. :-)

Well, if you can't release it (I guess I just assume from all your
mentions of it that it was going to be open), we'll probably be
building some of the same types of things ourselves.  It would
be a real shame if we both (and others) went to all that effort
in parallel without sharing. :(

-Peter