To:	cburke AT mitre DOT org (Carl D. Burke)
Cc:	djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject:	Re: Debuggers
Date:	Fri, 19 May 1995 13:29:11 PDT
From:	Marty Leisner <leisner AT sdsp DOT mc DOT xerox DOT com>

> >gdb is incredibly powerful if you know how to use it; it's the best
> >debugger I've ever seen.  Sure, it doesn't pop up little windows with
> >friendly buttons (unless you are running one of the graphical front
> >ends under Unix), but who cares?
> 
> It may be powerful if you know how to use it, but where do you learn that?
> I've tried setting breakpoints and examining variables, and it gives me
> some garbage about non-existent symbols (yes, -g was on).  I don't use
> assembly level debuggers very often, since if it gets that bad I've
> already failed, but it's not even as easy to use as dbx, which is pretty
> bad.  The info file didn't seem very helpful -- is there some tutorial
> somewhere that shows how to use gdb?
> 
> --
> 
> Rule of thumb: if you really need the debugger, the debugger will have bugs.
> 

I've used gdb for about 7 years and on djgpp, while its amazing it 
runs, on djgpp, I really encourage you to
	1) find another debugger
	2) debug on freebsd or linux or netbsd, then port to dos if possible

GDB has very few bugs (its improved immensely over the years...)

The gdb tutorial is pretty good...read it...


marty
leisner AT sdsp DOT mc DOT xerox DOT com  
Member of the League for Programming Freedom

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