[Mono-devel-list] Making --trace more useful

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hey guys,

   This is a post to request ideas on how to make --trace more useful.  
The mono --trace flag is fantastic to debug problems, but it has a
number of problems today:

	* It is not very useful with threads, it is hard to tell which
	  thread is doing the invocation.

	* Too much information: for small applications --trace works 
	  like a charm, but for anything moderately complex, we get 
	  bogged down watching the underlying code run (a simple use
	  of XmlSerialization will spam your console).

    Since tracing is such a useful tool, we need to improve it, but it
is not clear to me *how* to do it.  

    A few ideas:

	mono --trace program.exe

    That would only trace the program.exe assembly.

	mono --trace=all program.exe

    That would trace methods calls in all assemblies referenced from
program.exe

	mono --trace=System.Web.Services assembly

    That would only trace methods in System.Web.Services

        mono --trace=System.Web.Services.dll,method=System.Console.WriteLine progrm.exe

    That would trace System.Web.Services methods and also the method
System.Console.WriteLine.

    The threading issue is more complex, maybe we could have a separate
option that a GUI tool could use:

	mono --flag-thread --trace ...

    That would generate a prefix identifying the calling thread, and a
GUI tool can actually separate the data for human consumption.

Thoughts?
Miguel.