IDLE debugger questions

[Ned Deily]

In article 
<f710b476-ca92-414b-865b-feac70120114 at r31g2000prg.googlegroups.com>,
 Roger Davis <rbd at hawaii.edu> wrote:
> Thanks for that info, Ned, I can now get the sys.argv[] list I need,
> that's a big help! However, is there any other way to set a breakpoint
> in idle that will work on Mac OS X, maybe entering a manual command
> somewhere with a specified line number? Inability to set a breakpoint
> is an absolute showstopper for me, the code I am trying to debug loops
> way too much to be manually steppable in a human time frame.

Sorry about the long delay in replying.  It turns out that IDLE's 
breakpoint facility is currently unusable on OS X when Python Tkinter is 
built with Aqua Tk, the default on OS X.  The reason: IDLE implements 
the Set and Clear Breakpoints menu options through a context popup menu 
but the popup menus don't work with Aqua Tk.  On other systems, the 
popup menus are bound to the Right mouse button.  But on OS X, there's 
no guarantee that there is more than one button (the Left) and, even if 
there is, the button bindings are different for Aqua Tk.  The net effect 
is that you can't make the popup menus appear with or without a 
three-button mouse or equivalent.  As far as I can tell, this has been 
an issue ever since Python started using Aqua Tk on OS X instead of X11 
Tk, many releases ago.

I've opened an issue for the problem and supplied a patch to have IDLE 
use Control-Click for popups on OS X as is common in other applications.

   http://bugs.python.org/issue10404

Thanks for calling this problem to our attention!

-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org