[Mono-dev] sdb-cli: Command Line Interface to the Soft Debugger

[Bojan Rajkovic]

On Jun 13, 2011, at 11:47 AM, Alex wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> There are two reasons I chose to use Mono.Debugging:
> 
> 1) Expression evaluation.
> 2) Nicer interface for VM events (all the socket stuff is abstracted away).
> 
> I consider the first the most important, personally, and I don't think
> there's any other (efficient) way to feature expression evaluation.
> Expression evaluation is absolutely crucial, especially with a command
> line debugger (where you don't have pretty type visualizers), so it
> needs to be there in one form or another.
> 
> I'm also currently looking into adding ICSharpCode.Decompiler as a
> dependency, which would undoubtedly add to the friction... The reason
> for this is to allow decompiling assemblies for which there is no
> source code, and (hopefully) support debugging (breakpoints, etc) in
> the future.
> 
> Overall, it'll probably be hard to ship sdb-cli with Linux distros,
> but what about the Mac packages?
> 
> Regards,
> Alex

There's no reason it would be hard to ship with Linux distros—you'll just need to pull in source for the assemblies you use and keep it up to date, rather than using binaries and keeping those up to date. A little more effort  for you, but the downstreams will love you for playing nicely with them.

—Bojan