Mouse-Over variable display in idb 11.x

[ereisch]

One of the features with the new Java debugger has been dogging me for some time now, and I'd like to submit it as a formal bug. It appears as though the idb debugger is copying the "ddd" behavior of displaying variable values on mouse-over. This can be both extremely helpful, and in my case, extremely bothersome.

I have several variables which are structures/arrays that are rather large. One particular variable is defined as a COMMON, and has 44MB worth of nested structures, unions, and arrays. If my mouse happens over this variable in the source window for too long, the debugger attempts to display the contents of this structure for me, printing out dozens of warnings in the command window:

[idb Warning: Whole array is too long to display. Only the first $maxarrlen (1024) elements are shown.]

Depending on the size of the structure, my debugger can deadlock for 5 minutes or more while it attempts to traverse the entire structure tree, which can be rather bothersome considering I didn't even ask it to display that variable.

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Another issue that has been around for awhile (but is likely more my fault), is that I have a variable called "TYPE" as an element of a structure X. If I try to print the value of this variable, the debugger apparently is seeing "TYPE" as a keyword, and refuses to display the variable for me:

(idb) print X.TYPE
Unable to parse input as legal command or Fortran expression.

Unfortunately, our code base is too expansive to change all instances of the "TYPE" variable to something else that doesn't clash with the debugger. So at the moment, our workaround is to temporarily assign the contents of TYPE to another variable in the routine we're debugging so it can be displayed in the debugger.


Cheers

[ereisch]

Actually, I forgot to mention another bug we found. When you run the debugger in -dbx mode, the "-args" command-line option is ignored. If you start your program as:

$ idb -gui -gdb -args /tmp/myprogram.glx -a -b -c -d file.x

...and type "run" at the debugger command window, all works well, and the arguments are passed on to the program.

However, when you type:

$ idb -gui -dbx -args /tmp/myprogram.glx -a -b -c -d file.x

...and type "run" at the debugger command window, the program starts, but is not passed the command-line arguments that you specified when launching the debugger.