Mail Archives: cygwin/2002/07/26/21:23:47
Sometime recently (but *before* that last upgrade that botched things
up) gdb apparently got tired of working decided to retire.
When run with an image, it used to work quite nicely. I used it to
track down a crash a few months back; this proved to be caused by a
DLL problem that was causing the program to jump at a trampoline and
bounce off into never-never land. Nasty to track down that kind of
problem without a debugger.
Well, now I have no debugger, and I've managed to fix about three
core-dumping bugs since it quit working without it's help, but it's
only a matter of time before I really truly *need* it working or the
world will end.
Symptoms: gdb foo-executable-name brings up a normal window with the
right source file open and the highlight on the main() function's
start. You click the run icon in the upper left corner and...
nothing happens.
You click it again. You use the menu item. Nothing happens.
You see there's a breakpoint on the first line, remove it. Now
something happens: the breakpoint magically reappears. But it doesn't
run.
You go to the console and hit run and this time you actually get an
error message instead of a silent failure:
Error: Error creating process <image path>, (error 193)
Then you look at the documentation. There's no documentation of the
error codes.
This seems to mean we have 2 bugs and 1 "bug of omission" here.
Bug #1: It quits working for no good reason without anything having
been changed in its configuration. That's just plain bad.
Bug #2: It fails silently rather than present a diagnostic in, say, a
dialog box under some circumstances. This is practically the #1 no-no
of UI design, guys!
Bug of omission: The feature that most certainly should be there that
translates internal error numbers into meaningful diagnostic messages
isn't implemented. It's just not reasonable to present the end user
with "(error 193)". Even when the end user is definitely a
programmer. He knows his own code's error numbers by heart, most
likely, but someone else's code's error numbers are as cryptic to him
as anyone else. This screwy error reporting, incidentally, being the
Macintosh's sole UI defect, aside from lack of decent powerful
options in general and decent free development tools in particular;
"This application has unexpectedly quit because an error of type -53
occurred" has to be the most awful thing I ever had the displeasure
to see on a computer screen. No clue what's really wrong. No clue how
to fix it. (Yes, my high school forced me to use a Mac. I still bear
the psychological scars to this very day.)
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