Re: Debugger wishlist

On 12/13/2016 09:30 AM, Sam Kington wrote:
> On 13 Dec 2016, at 02:32, Ricardo Signes <perl.p5p@rjbs.manxome.org> wrote:
>> * Sam Kington <sam@illuminated.co.uk> [2016-12-03T09:45:56]
>>> This is curiosity rather than anything else, but: why is the debugger using
>>> single quotes here?
>> I could well be wrong, but my guess would be: because dumpvar.pl is kind of a
>> mess.  I would hope that we'd be open to improving it iteratively over time,
>> and not take its existing formatting as set in stone.
>>
>> (The dumper to be used by perl5db.pl is actually configurable, but this doesn't
>> appear to be documented, and it might not really work as such.)
> OTTOYH (or indeed anybody’s H), what’s wrong with dumpvar.pl / perl5db.pl in general, and in particular? I’ve been vaguely thinking about giving back to the community via hacking on core; I’m not a C programmer and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the internals, but something in pure-Perl I can cope with.
>
> Having just thought about it for almost literally just a minute or two, but remembering my frustrations with the debugger over the years, my personal list would include:
>
> (1) Watch expressions and lexical variables not playing well together. If you’re in a loop and you set a watch expression on a lexical variable that’s currently set, the watch expression will fire as soon as the code enters e.g. a subroutine or method elsewhere, as that variable will now be undef. But that’s not helpful and makes watch expressions useless.
>
> (2) Dumping of e.g. huge DBIx::Class objects being an absolute pain. Those things are absolutely massive and if you dump a data structure without thinking “wait, hang on, that might contain a DBIx::Class object of some kind”, you may end up with screenfuls of unhelpful noise, killing your scrollback.
>
> Is there a canonical list somewhere, e.g. a RT queue or something? Other than the general “It would be nice to clear up XXX comments” in the documentation?

There is no specific RT queue for the debugger other than the basic one
for Perl 5. Just mention it's for perldb and mark it as a wishlist.

• Why does the debugger use single quotes when dumping strings? by Sam Kington
• Re: Why does the debugger use single quotes when dumping strings? by Ricardo Signes
• Debugger wishlist (was: Re: Why does the debugger use single quoteswhen dumping strings?) by Sam Kington
• Re: Debugger wishlist by Sawyer X