comparison etc/DEBUG @ 32523:4881cd839f12

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32522:fedf4de246a1

Debugging GNU Emacs
Copyright (c) 1985 Richard M. Stallman.

   Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
   of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the
   copyright notice and permission notice are preserved,
   and that the distributor grants the recipient permission

   Permission is granted to distribute modified versions
   of this document, or of portions of it,
   under the above conditions, provided also that they
   carry prominent notices stating who last changed them.

On 4.2 you will probably find that dbx does not work for
debugging GNU Emacs.  For one thing, dbx does not keep the
inferior process's terminal modes separate from its own.
For another, dbx does not put the inferior in a separate
process group, which makes trouble when an inferior uses
interrupt input, which GNU Emacs must do on 4.2.

dbx has also been observed to have other problems,
such as getting incorrect values for register variables
in stack frames other than the innermost one.

The Emacs distribution now contains GDB, the new source-level
debugger for the GNU system.  GDB works for debugging Emacs.
GDB currently runs on vaxes under 4.2 and on Sun 2 and Sun 3
systems.


** Some useful techniques

`Fsignal' is a very useful place to stop in.
All Lisp errors go through there.

Put a breakpoint early in `main', or suspend the Emacs,
to get an opportunity to do the set command.

If you are using cbreak input (see the Lisp function set-input-mode),
then typing Control-g will cause a SIGINT, which will return control
to the debugger immediately unless you have done

    ignore 3  (in dbx)
or  handle 3 nostop noprint  (in gdb)

You will note that most of GNU Emacs is written to avoid
declaring a local variable in an inner block, even in
cases where using one would be the cleanest thing to do.
This is because dbx cannot access any of the variables
in a function which has even one variable defined in an
inner block.  A few functions in GNU Emacs do have variables
in inner blocks, only because I wrote them before realizing
that dbx had this problem and never rewrote them to avoid it.

I believe that GDB does not have such a problem.


** Examining Lisp object values.

When you have a live process to debug, and it has not encountered a

32523:4881cd839f12

Debugging GNU Emacs
Copyright (c) 1985, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

   Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
   of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the
   copyright notice and permission notice are preserved,
   and that the distributor grants the recipient permission

   Permission is granted to distribute modified versions
   of this document, or of portions of it,
   under the above conditions, provided also that they
   carry prominent notices stating who last changed them.

** Some useful techniques

`Fsignal' is a very useful place to stop in.
All Lisp errors go through there.

Put a breakpoint early in `main', or suspend the Emacs,
to get an opportunity to do the set command.

If you are using cbreak input (see the Lisp function set-input-mode),
then typing Control-g will cause a SIGINT, which will return control
to GDB immediately if you type this command first:

    handle 2 stop


** Examining Lisp object values.

When you have a live process to debug, and it has not encountered a