[Mono-devel-list] Debugger support in mcs

[Martin Baulig]

Nick Drochak <ndrochak at gol.com> writes:

> It seems that debugger support is not in mcs by default. I had put
> '/debug+ /debug:full' in the makefile.gnu for corlib, but at least one
> person got the error that it couldn't find the symbol writer.
> 
> Would it be possible for mcs to give a warning instead of throwing an
> exception and stopping with a stack trace if the symbol writer is not
> available?

Hi,

if I remember correctly, I intentionally made it throw an exception rather than just
reporting a warning, but this should only happen on Linux.  On Windows, it should either
print a warning or silently ignore the /debug switch.

The problem is that on Linux, you always have the symbol writer, so not having it is
actually an installation problem - I got a few bug reports from people who had this
problem and were complaining the the debugger did not work for them.

However, in either case, the error / warning message needs to be improved to tell people
what's actually wrong.  It'd be fine for me having it print a warning on Linux which tells
people that it's an installation problem and that they need to compile and install the
Mono.CSharp.Debugger directory.

So, IMO the perfect solution would be:

a) on Linux, print something like

   Could not find the symbol writer.  This is normally an installation problem, please
   make sure to compile and install the mcs/class/Mono.CSharp.Debugger directory.

b) on Windows, when running on the MS runtime, print something like

   Debugging support is not yet supported on this platform.  To get debugging support, you
   must compile and install the mcs/class/Mono.CSharp.Debugger directory and run mcs using
   the mono runtime.

c) on Windows, when running on the Mono runtime

   Do the same than a).

So we basically just need to detect whether we're running on the Mono or MS runtime and
print either a) or b).

I'm currently very busy with other stuff, could you have a look at this ?

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin at gnome.org
martin at ximian.com