Re: Enabling --enable-check-lisp-object-type by default on x86 and AMD64

[Paul Eggert]

On 05/03/2017 07:48 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Would it help to add a line "set print frame-arguments all" to
> > src/.gdbinit?
> Only partially.  People who report backtraces seldom bother to start
> GDB from the Emacs's src directory, let alone source .gdbinit by hand.
> Moreover, latest versions of GDB refuse to auto-load .gdbinit files
> from random directories, unless you put some magic in your ~/.gdbinit
> (which most people don't).

This problem is not new. It should be OK to continue ask developers to 
source .gdbinit, to compile with -O0, etc. If we can't assume that, the 
backtrace is already problematic, and the recent change doesn't make it 
much worse.

> this setting doesn't affect only
> Lisp_Object, it affects any non-scalar arguments, so it has
> non-trivial downsides of its own (which I guess is why it is not the
> default).

True. How about using GDB pretty-printers instead?  E.g., add something 
like the attached file as src/gdb-pretty.py, and add the line "source 
gdb-pretty.py" to src/.gdbinit. That way, only Lisp_Object values are 
affected, rather than all structs.

gdb-pretty.py
Description: Text Data