On Aug 11, 2005, at 3:02 PM, Anthony Baxter wrote:
On Monday 08 August 2005 20:13, Ilya Sandler wrote:
At OSCON, Anthony Baxter made the point that pdb is currently one of the more unPythonic modules.
What is unpythonic about pdb? Is this part of Anthony's presentation online? (Google found a summary and slides from presentation but they don't say anything about pdb's deficiencies)
It was a lightning talk, I'll put the slides up somewhere at some point. My experience with pdb is that it's more or less impossible to extend or subclass it in any way, and the code is pretty nasty. In addition, pretty much everyone I asked "which modules in the std lib need to be seriously fixed" listed pdb first (and sometimes first, second and third).
One thing PDB needs is a mode that runs as a background thread and opens up a socket so that another Python process can talk to it, for embedded/remote/GUI debugging. This is what IDLE, Wing, and WinPDB (haven't tried it yet <http://www.digitalpeers.com/pythondebugger/ index.html>) do. Unfortunately, most of the other Python IDE's run interpreters and debuggers in-process, so it makes them unsuitable for developing GUI and embedded apps and opens you up for crashing the IDE as well as whatever code you're trying to fix. -bob