pdb bug and questions

[R. Bernstein]

Stef Mientki <stef.mientki at gmail.com> writes:

> hello,
>
> I'm trying to embed a debugger into an editor.
> I'm only interested in high level debugging.
> The first question is what debugger is the best for my purpose ?
> (pdb, pydb, rpdb2, smart debugger, extended debugger ?
>
> Second question, in none of the above debuggers (except rpdb2),
> I can find a  "break now",
> so it seems impossible to me to detect unlimited while loops ?

I am not sure what you mean by "break now". pdb and pydb allow direct
calls from a program to the debugger via set_trace (which in pydb is
deprecated in favor of I think the more descriptive name: debugger)

But I suspect this is not what you mean to "detect unlimited while
loops"; pydb also has gdb-style signal handling that allows for entry
into the debugger when the debugged python process receives a
particular signal. "info handle" lists all of the interrupts and what
action is to be taken on each. See
http://bashdb.sourceforge.net/pydb/pydb/lib/node38.html

However I believe that signals are only handled by the main thread; so
if that's blocked, the python process won't see the signal.

>
> For the moment I started with pdb, because most of the debuggers seems
> to be an extension on pdb.
> When I launch the debugger ( winXP, Python 2.5) from with my editor
>  python -u -m pdb  D:\\Data\\test_IDE.py
> I get this error
>  IOError: (2, 'No such file or directory', 'D:\\Data\test_IDE.py')
> NOTICE 1 backslash ----------------------------------^
>
> If I launch the debugger with
>  python -u -m pdb  D:/Data/test_IDE.py
> It runs fine.
>
> This looks like a bug to me.
> What's the best way to report these kind of bugs ?

winpdb, pydb and pdb (part of Python) all have Sourceforge projects
which have bug trackers. For pdb, in the past people includng myself,
have reported features, patches and bugs in the Python tracker;
eventually it gets handled. (Eventually in my case means a year or
so.) But if my information is incorrect or out of date, no doubt
someone will correct me.

As mentioned in the last paragraph, pydb also is a Sourceforge project
(part of bashdb) which has a tracker for bug reporting. Using the bug
tracker I think is better than discussing pydb bugs in c.l.p. By
extension, I assume the same is also true for the other debuggers.

Finally, I think rpdb2 is part of the winpdb project on Sourceforge
and again has a bug tracker. My sense is that Nir Aides is very good
about handling bugs reported in winpdb/rpdb.

>
> Although I mostly use os.path.join to be OS independent,
> these kind of bugs give me the impression,
> that I can better do the join myself and always use forward slashes.
> Is this a valid conclusion ?
>
> thanks,
> Stef Mientki