Re: "False exceptions?" (was Re: theme of the week: tools

From: Dan Perl (danperl_at_rogers.com)
Date: 10/01/04 

Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 21:08:52 -0400

"David Bolen" <db3l@fitlinxx.com> wrote in message
news:u7jqb4afj.fsf@fitlinxx.com...
> "Dan Perl" <danperl@rogers.com> writes:
>
>> (...) In my experience with sporadic problems like the ones you are
>> describing, debuggers are usually not much help, except after the fact,
>> for
>> instance debugging a core of a C/C++ program. If the problem is caused
>> by a
>> race condition, a debugger can be useless because it affects the
>> scheduling
>> of threads. How does the loaded stub work in cases like that? Does it
>> affect threads in any way?
>
> Yes, once the debugger is actually activated (you start up the IDE and
> it attaches) it's like a normal Python debugger, so it uses the trace
> hook and will have some impact on runtime. You can finesse this a little
> by
> controlling where you import the stub and/or when you connect to the
> process.

Interesting. So it's actively attached to the process, not just listening
to it. I would like to find out more about how this debug stub works. The
Wing IDE reference manual doesn't get into details like that, but I can see
that one can also set breakpoints remotely. That should mean that the stub
does quite a bit of work.

Since my previous posting on this thread I have discovered an interesting
utility for remote reporting of exceptions, although I couldn't try it:
http://egofile.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi. My understanding is that it sends
an HTTP POST message. That should mean that it's much less powerful than
the Wing IDE stub but it should be also less intrusive.

And I also found win32traceutil
(http://www.python.org/windows/win32/#win32trace), which has quite a similar
use. Of course, it's only for Windows, and I'm not sure whether it works
with the listener and the debugged process on different nodes. But this is
something I may personally use.

Any experience with these tools? Especially with win32traceutil, because
that's something I may use.

Dan

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