Re: A new maintainer for DDD

[Andreas Zeller]

Dear Shaunak,

as one of the original DDD authors, I wish you all the best for your efforts.  
Long live DDD!

Best wishes,

Andreas

On 2013-04-05, at 09:47, shaunak saha <address@hidden> wrote:

> Greetings to the DDD community.
> 
> I have taken over the maintainership of DDD.
> 
> At the moment, my own efforts are directed towards completing Peter 
> Wainwright's work on developing a new GTK interface to replace the vulnerable 
> Motif front end of DDD. 
> We wish to separate the GUI from the main program logic, so that development 
> of DDD can proceed without requiring simultaneous updates to N separate 
> platform-specific implementations. In order to do this we will introduce a 
> “shim” or “wrapper” which will connect DDD to the underlying GUI toolkit. In 
> order to implement DDD using another toolkit, the only necessary modification 
> is the creation of a new wrapper. Modifications to the DDD core logic will 
> automatically affect all implementations. 
> 
> Apart from this I will be  working on few other tasks.
> 
> Many applications now consist of a number of interacting processes running 
> the same or different programs. The most extreme example might be HPC 
> applications using MPI on large clusters. But even desktop applications often 
> use two or more processes communicating over a network socket. 
> It would be very cool and useful to have a decent framework for debugging 
> these. 
> GDB 7.0 has basic support for multi-process inferior control, implemented in 
> the remote target, but it can only be used to debug systems that share code 
> across all inferiors.
> GDB 7.1 extends that by providing support for multi-process and 
> multi-executable debugging for linux systems (native and remote) as well. 
> This means being able to load several programs under a single GDB session; 
> "run" or "attach" to several processes under a single GDB session, each 
> possibly running a different program; or following all the forks and execs of 
> an inferior and its children tree.
> GDB 7.2 adds support for multi-executable control to the machine interface 
> (MI).
> We might start a separate GDB inferior for each process and manage the 
> multi-process stuff in DDD.
> 
> DDD should use GDB/MI2 interface.
> Modern GDB has an alternative interface (MI/MI2) which is designed for use 
> with front-end debuggers. 
> Using this would avoid the difficulties involved in parsing output which is 
> really designed for clever humans. 
> 
> The present interface to the inferior debuggers involves multiple switch
> statements (case BASH, case DBX, case GDB...) scattered through the
> code.  It would be helpful to have a more modular approach to this so
> that we could add new languages more easily.
> 
> Adding support for new gdb features like reversible debugging.
> 
> There are still bugs in DDD, so bug-fixing should continue.
> 
> Various enhancements to DDD have been implemented since the last release and 
> many patches got submitted. To consolidate these, a new release is needed. I 
> am planning to make few 3.3.13-testx releases, before the big 3.3.13. I shall 
> be looking into this in the next few months...
> 
> Regards,
> Shaunak

-- 
Andreas Zeller  Saarland University  http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/zeller/

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