[Mono-dev] [Ximian-mono-list] Generics Sharing in the Debugger: Request for breaking the code freeze

[Martin Baulig]

One word about attaching:

The current situation is that attaching is officially disabled and not
supported (as of July 4th, 2008).

My understanding was that we'll enable generics sharing by default in
Mono 2.0 and I didn't want to tell people that the debugger can do
attaching if that feature doesn't work in the default configuration of
Mono.

>From a technical point of view, if you try to attach to a process:

a) which is running without --debug

   You won't be able to get managed backtraces, but nothing bad should
   happen.

   This "feature" is officially supported, but completely untested.  The
   debugger may even crash at the moment, but that'd be considered a
   bug and should be easy to fix.

b) which is running with --debug and generics sharing

   The debugger will crash.

c) which is running without --debug and generics sharing

   Should be exactly the same as in a).

So basically, if we enable attaching in the debugger, we need to make
sure that the target process is not running with generics sharing.

So either, we keep attaching disabled, or we add a check to tell the
debugger whether we're running with generics sharing or not.  Last week,
I had no time to implement this check, so I turned it off.

-- 
Martin Baulig - martin at novell.com
Novell GmbH, Düsseldorf
GF: Volker Smid, Djamel Souici; HRB 21108 (AG Düsseldorf)