stack window

stack window

[Tom Tromey]

Today I tried to use the stack window.

First, it doesn't display nearly enough information.

Second, clicking on a line does not do anything useful.  In fact, it
hoses my session.  The cursor changes to an hourglass over the source
window, and the source window just goes blank.  Nothing I do changes
this.

Tom

Re: stack window

[James Ingham]

Tom,

I need more details.  In ordinary C code, the stack window works
fine...  I bet you have hit some error that didn't get caught.  Maybe
a source file not found error similar to the "pane5 doesn't exist"
error you saw earlier...

Some general diagnostic tricks: if you run with the console window
open, and it is hovering in the hourglass, go to the console, and
type:

tk gdbtk_idle

If this gives you back control, it means that you did get some error
that jumped over the point where the gui meant to call idle...  If you 
can reproduce the error, then while it is still spinning, attach to it 
with something like tkCon, and do:

set ::errorInfo

and see if that gives you any useful info...

On the lack of details.  What we found was that if you are doing
embedded development, then having all the arguments in the stack
window (I presume this is mainly what you want?) caused Insight to be
really slow at stepping, etc.  So we removed these.  The ultimate goal 
is to redo the window so that each level of the stack has a little
exposure triangle that reveals the arguments.  That way, you could
progressively reveal those you were interested in.  At this point, it
would also be easy to add an option to open all the turndowns by
default, which you may or may not want for native development.

But, as you may be coming to expect now, we didn't have the time to
complete the advanced design, so you are left with what is there now.

Jim

 > Today I tried to use the stack window.
 > 
 > First, it doesn't display nearly enough information.
 > 
 > Second, clicking on a line does not do anything useful.  In fact, it
 > hoses my session.  The cursor changes to an hourglass over the source
 > window, and the source window just goes blank.  Nothing I do changes
 > this.
 > 
 > Tom
 > 

Re: stack window

[Tom Tromey]

Jim> I need more details.  In ordinary C code, the stack window works
Jim> fine...  I bet you have hit some error that didn't get caught.  Maybe
Jim> a source file not found error similar to the "pane5 doesn't exist"
Jim> error you saw earlier...

I found out how to reproduce it: if I click on a frame, and gdb can't
find the file for that frame, then I get the bad behavior.

Jim> But, as you may be coming to expect now, we didn't have the time
Jim> to complete the advanced design, so you are left with what is
Jim> there now.

Thanks for the info.

T

Re: stack window

[James Ingham]

Tom,

Yeah, this is the same error as the one you reported before where you
got a Tcl stack traceback.  The reason is the same: not finding a
source file causes the Source window's cache to get confused, and you
are pretty much lost from there on out.  This has to be fixed, but the 
real solution is to rip out the code and rewrite it, which is a couple 
two or three of weeks of work.  I really don't want to try bandaging
this particular bit of code any more, as it is pretty bad, and it
implements a very important part of the UI.

Jim

 > Jim> I need more details.  In ordinary C code, the stack window works
 > Jim> fine...  I bet you have hit some error that didn't get caught.  Maybe
 > Jim> a source file not found error similar to the "pane5 doesn't exist"
 > Jim> error you saw earlier...
 > 
 > I found out how to reproduce it: if I click on a frame, and gdb can't
 > find the file for that frame, then I get the bad behavior.
 > 
 > Jim> But, as you may be coming to expect now, we didn't have the time
 > Jim> to complete the advanced design, so you are left with what is
 > Jim> there now.
 > 
 > Thanks for the info.
 > 
 > T
 >