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From: Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Intervention needed?
Date: Wed, 03 Apr 2019 22:01:56 +0100
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Date: 2019-04-03T22:01:56+01:00
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Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid> writes:

> I find, like Dmitry, that tracing and logging functions, either built
> into the program and optionally activated, or inserted ad hoc to
> understand a specific bug, are more useful. Even if the problem is not
> found in the first attempt, but needs incremental addition or
> activation of more or other logs and traces, the process is much less
> frustrating than an interactive gdb session because there is much more
> control, much less noise due to irrelevant outputs from the program
> and the debugger, and no confusion between source level and machine
> level.

Agreed; in fact, we never managed to get GDB working on our VxWorks
PowerPC hardware. I don't think we seriously tried. Logging was the
thing (including exception tracebacks; unhandled exceptions were fatal,
essential in the development environment)

My part got tested on the desktop using a Tcl-based scripted testing
tool[1], which meant that I could reproduce the scenario from the logs
taken on site/at sea, demonstrate the problem, solve it (OK, sometimes
using the debugger), demonstrate the cure, & add that script to the test
suite.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/scriptedtesting.coldframe.p/
    (I really need to rescue this from SF & move it to Github!)