Re: [Mingw-users] [ Mingw-users ] dbghelp integration

[Bostjan M. <cco...@gm...>]

I posted several questions on debugging here, and only ever got one
reply: about DrMingw, of course. Seems nobody cares about solid
debugging mechanisms anymore, and MinGW provides no solution for core
dumps, the mechanism used everywhere else.

DrMingw has a certain DLL you can link with, and it should produce a
stack trace. Note that this is still not the ideal solution, since
just the stack trace will not be able to tell you some stuff that a
debugger with a stack dump can. Like the exact state of multiple
threads. You also need to distribute with the debug info included,
which I see as something that should not be necessary.

GDB is ported, but cannot read Windows-produced stack dumps. Based on
my research, this is still your (and my) best bet, though, for serious
debugging. There exists a project:
http://code.google.com/p/google-breakpad/
that includes a tool called md2core, or minidump-2-core. You can find
its source by following source -> browse -> svn -> trunk -> src ->
tools -> linux -> md2core.
I'm trying to make this Linux tool compile on Windows, hoping to be
able to convert minidump files to dumps that GDB could read. I made a
quick port, but it doesn't work. Probably did not include the right
Windows and Linux header values. Will continue trying.

If anybody else wants to try porting md2core for MinGW and MinGW-port
GDB, please help. This tool would advance MinGWs debugging abilities
to a solid state.

Best regards,
Bostjan