Re: [Bashdb-devel] debugger for zsh

[Rocky B. <roc...@gm...>]

On 12/27/06, nws...@al... <
nws...@al...> wrote:
>
> Rocky,
>
> I took a quick look at the bashdb web site. Great work!


Again, thanks.

I hope that someone will be willing to port it to zsh.


I hope your have more luck with your hoping that I have had in the past. Or
hope you will not not be disappointed if it doesn't happen.

A little fable:
When I first learned about Perl4 I thought, gee, this is great -- it has
hash tables, access to C library routines and a debugger. I'll just wait for
POSIX shells to disappear. Ten years later, I'm still plagued with init
scipts and configure scripts that are written using POSIX shells. So I
embarked on that debugger.

When that debugger became good enough to debug configure scripts, I thought
all my autotools  problems were solved! Well, no there still was GNU Make. I
read this article about autoconf http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/889/ and
suggested someone write a debugger for GNU Make. A year later, I started
writing one myself.

Sometimes people tell me: I don't really have the skills to undertake such a
task. Maybe. But I'm not sure I had the skills to do many of the projects
I've undertook beforehand either.

moral: one can suggest, hope, pray, and/or  wait. But if it's really
important I've found it more expedient to just dig in. :-)



I have
> invested too much in zsh to give it up for bash now. Besides, zsh
> does have many good features that I like.
>
> Keep up the excellent work.
>
> mk
>
> ********************************************************************
>
> > From roc...@gm... Wed Dec 27 08:53:59 2006
> > To: "Masatake YAMATO" <je...@gy...>
> > Subject: Re: [Bashdb-devel] debugger for zsh
> > Cc: mkk...@al..., bas...@li...
> >
> > Thanks for the kind words.
> >
> > I just looked at the excellent zsh documentation
> > (http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/index-frame.html).  It has
> > many interesting and nice features.
> >
> > For example in the bash debugger we wrote our own routine to read a
> > file into an array quickly. I see in zsh this is called "mapfile".
> > (Masatake: That's the name you decided on in revising readarray.c,
> > right? - zsh I now see that got there first with this routine, so we
> > should make it easy on those folks who use both.)
> >
> > There are some things added to bash mostly between versions 2.05b and
> > 3.0 that might not be in zsh (yet). For example I see there is  a
> > LINENO variable, and for functions it reports the position as the
> > absolute position from the file it was included from - good! However
> > in a debugger (or debugging tool such as line tracing), one would also
> > probably want the name of the source file. And one would want this
> > information for all of the routines in the current call stack.
> >
> > Another thing that is nice (but not strictly necessary) would be a
> > variable which stores the command that is about to be executed. If zsh
> > doesn't already have these, I suspect these are pretty easy to add.
> >
> > But even without these, one could probably write some sort of
> > debugger.  However nice zsh is,  I don't have a need for using it and
> > I can't  justify spending time on this. someone wants to undertake
> > this, I'd be happy to answer questions or offer a little help. (Ditto
> > for ksh93 which also has nice features and might be even easier to
> > write a debugger for than bashdb was.)
> >
> > One way to get started is to write a program that more or less
> > simulates set -x. See
> >
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=31299742&forum_id=12061
> > Even though this is not how bashdb was developed, I think it would be
> > a good approach. The idea is that after you are convinced you can get
> > some basic information about the program non-interactively, and that
> > you cover tracing the entire program, adding a read loop and adding
> > conditions under which you want to stop is pretty straightforward.
> >
> > On 12/27/06, Masatake YAMATO <je...@gy...> wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I read your article
> > >
> > >   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.shells.zsh.devel/11563
> > >
> > >
> > > F.Y.I bash has really good debugger written by Rocky Bernstein. See
> > >
> > >   http://bashdb.sourceforge.net/
> > >
> > > bashdb is well documented. So it will be help to implement a debugger
> > > for zsh.
> > >
> > > Masatake YAMATO
> > >
> > >
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> >
>
>