[m-dev.] for review: the new debugger command set (part 1 of 5)

[Tyson Dowd]

On 16-Sep-1998, Zoltan Somogyi <zs at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> 
> Since we want full debugger functionality in the release, this diff
> is for inclusion in the release. The nominated reviewers are Fergus
> and Tyson, but I would also like feedback from Erwan.

Mark should review your description of the debugger in terms of the
box model (in part 2).

> 
> Note that this change is not quite complete, in two respects. One, the new
> debugging chapter in the user guide is not finished; I'd like your feedback
> on what level of explanatory detail is required. Two, this change makes
> functions in the runtime called by MR_trace to refer to the library.
> We have tried to avoid such references so far, by putting the references
> into the auto-generated *_init.c files. However, we can't do this with
> the new references, because this would pull into *every* executable
> library modules that are required only if some module is execution traced.
> I'd appreciate suggestions for better solutions.

My biggest criticism is that this is an enormous change, and would
be much better reviewed as a few different changes.

The problem is you are not going to get very detailed comments on a
particular change, because there are 17 separate changes whose diffs are
intertwined, so it is difficult to remember what a particular change was
even intended to achieve, let alone whether it is correct.

Here is a list of what I consider to be the separate changes in
this diff.
	- Change command set.
	- Add redo events
	- Reduce arguments to MR_trace
	- Renumber framevars
	- Generate online documentation.
	- Add user guide docs for debugging
	- Clean up some documentation
	- Reorganize handling of tracing levels
	- Identify variables separately
	- Fix a bug with return live vals not being computed right.
	- Allow debugger to output to streams other than stdout.
	- Add help.m to the library.
	- Add stack layout info for builtin_aggregate
	- Fix problem with higher order stack layouts.
	- Miscellaneous fixes and additions to the runtime
	- Add trace histogram feature.
	- A few improvements to bootstrap.

I think calling this change "the new debugger command set" is a bit
misleading.  Perhaps "things I did last winter" ;-)

Please commit at least some of these are separate changes.

It would be nice if all bug fix changes could be committed with test
cases that exercise that particular bug, and all feature additions
have a corresponding test case too.

> doc/user_guide.texi:
> 	Add a new section on the debugger. The description of the commands
> 	is complete, but some of the background sections are not yet done.
> 
> 	Update the documentation of the tracing options.


You forgot to mention the other changes to the documentation that you
made (which should have been separate anyway).

More comments to come.

-- 
       Tyson Dowd           # There isn't any reason why Linux can't be
                            # implemented as an enterprise computing solution.
     trd at cs.mu.oz.au        # Find out what you've been missing while you've
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~trd # been rebooting Windows NT. -- InfoWorld, 1998.