How can I reload a pretty printer?
meator via Gdb <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.gdb.devel |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Hi. When writing a pretty printer, I want to repeatedly test it. This is pretty complicated because GDB has no builtin mechanisms to do such thing (that I know of) and breakpoint() pretty much can not be used because GDB's Python doesn't have access to the capable pty so interactive use of PDB is impossible. Even the classic "printf style" debugging doesn't work because Python's print() doesn't work (gdb.write() has to be used instead). I need to test the pretty printer often because the official Python interface documentation is quite lacking and the interface itself is imperfect^1. Accessing the docstrings of the Python interface is difficult because the gdb module nor other modules can be imported in standalone Python (I've tried to add it to $PYTHONPATH but with no success; How are you supposed to access the docstrings?). Therefore my last solution is to load the pretty printer, try it in gdb, modify the pretty printer and repeat. But a pretty printer can be sourced only once because the second source call will fail due to the fact that the pretty printer is already registered. I have to restart GDB every time I modify the pretty printer which is extremely impractical. Is there a way to live reload the pretty printer? 1: There is no sane way to call member functions through gdb.Value which is kind of important in C++: https://stackoverflow.com/q/22774067/13840624