Re: [PATCH V1 1/1] contrib/vscode/: debugging with VS Code and gdb

From: Matthieu Moy <matthieu.moy@univ-lyon1.fr>
Date: Apr 7, 2022, 08:59 UTC
Message-ID: <6a5152c1-7bb4-220c-cdce-33e93ea9c7c6@univ-lyon1.fr>
In-Reply-To: <66f08cb2e81647e29a080af05d7c867e@SAMBXP02.univ-lyon1.fr>

On 4/6/22 10:47, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> 
> On Wed, Apr 06 2022, COGONI Guillaume wrote:
> 
> I really don't mind having some guide for VSCode in our developer
> documentation, but I think if we (as a free software project) are
> recommending proprietary software we should put that in some context
> where we explain if/why it's needed, and if free alternatives are also
> suitable.

Note that VS Code is mostly open source (the pre-compiled binaries are proprietary, but the source code is MIT licenced, https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode). Not to be confused with Visual Studio, which is fully proprietary, but is a totally different tool (AFAIK, they only share the name).

> I haven't used the VSCode integration you're documenting, but from the
> diff and the "gdb" mention I gather that this isn't using some "native"
> debugger of MSVC/VS's, but just using the VSCode editor as a wrapper for
> gdb?

Yes (gdb or lldb under the hood). As usual, it adds a GUI layer, but also a configuration layer where you specify how to launch the debugger in a launch.json file, and this is where the little script in contrib/ is handy to generate a launch.json adapted for Git.

> If that's the case wouldn't it suffice to link to some generic getting
> started guide for debuggers? And e.g. recommend the GDB manual, maybe
> there's a better online reference (I read it locally), but e.g.:
> https://www.sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb.html

To me the point of the doc within Git's repo is to document git-specific aspects, and I agree that pointing to a generic doc is better than re-writing one. If I had written the patch I'd have made the general paragraph on debugger benefits a bit shorter, but it's already rather short so I'm OK with the patch in its current state.

> Then if we're recommending GUI wrappers those are a dime a dozen,
> e.g. Emacs's GUD mode:
> https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Debuggers.html

To me this is out of the scope of the patch (the real point to me was to increase the discoverability of contrib/vscode), but sure, documenting other GUI wrappers would be nice.

-- 
Matthieu Moy
https://matthieu-moy.fr/