Re: problems with gdb

[Jim Kingdon <kingdon at redhat dot com>]

> I'm interested in getting my hands dirty and try to get these
> problems fixed.  I'm not a debugger hacker though so I might end up
> asking some silly questions.  :)

Ask away, GDB needs all the help we can get.  Mozilla is in many ways
an ideal testbed but in the past I didn't get very far because I
didn't do enough to turn the problems into test cases (and Mozilla
people didn't either).

I've added a link to the Mozilla debugging FAQ to
http://sourceware.cygnus.com/gdb/ (at the bottom of the page).

I'd particularly like your feedback on
http://sourceware.cygnus.com/issues50.html - e.g. the dclose() section
shows a solution which I suspect would be very, very bad for
performance debugging Mozilla (can you confirm this?).  Also, the
glibc 2.1.3 section is likely to be relevant.

> There are a lot of people who work at Netscape who would be using
> Linux as their primary platform if, and I'm quoting here, "using gdb
> wasn't like scratching your own eyes out."

Yeah, let's fix it.  I suspect it is probably a relatively small
number of C++ and threads bugs, and that with a modest effort we could
make things much more pleasant.