RE: Debugging with JDEE

Hi Suraj,

 

My day job has grown increasingly demanding over the last couple of
years and I've also been preoccupied with my children's transition from
high school to college. This has left me with less time than I would
like to devote to the JDEE.

 

However, I plan to continue to update and make releases. One thing that
would help would be to streamline the JDEE itself and its source
repository. Currently, there are two branches, a main branch and a
maintenance branch. The reason I branched was that last year I embarked
on restructuring the JDEE's interface to jdb and JDEbug to try to create
a common interface and thereby reduce the maintenance burden.
Unfortunately, this was a far more time-consuming project than I had
anticipated, in fact was soaking up all the time I had for the JDEE.
Meanwhile a large backlog of bugfixes and incremental improvements were
accumulating. So at some users' suggestion  I decided to branch from
JDEE 2.3.5 in order to be able to release accumulated bug fixes and
other improvements. Just creating this branch was a time-consuming
operation. Now, I'm stuck with a main branch that has the new
generalized debugger interface in a half-finished state with no prospect
of finishing it any time soon and a maintenance branch that allows me to
keep releasing but requires double-updating for every change.

 

I've been giving some thought has how to extricate the JDEE from this
morass and have been considering doing the following:

 

* Drop JDEBug from the JDEE.

 

  I've never been happy with JDEbug. I think it was overly ambitious in
design and complicated in its implementation and as a 

  result is difficult to use and maintain. Personally I use the JDEE's
jdb interface for debugging and find it adequate for my purposes. 

  Dropping JDEbug would allow me to focus on improving the jdb
interface.

 

* Include Nascif's JSWAT interface in the JDEE distribution for those
JDEE user's who need a more capable debugger than jdb.

  I don't know whether it's possible but it if is it would be nice to
provide a JSWAT interface that allows source-level debugging

  within Emacs, i.e., I'm thinking that it might be possible to have
JSWAT replace JDEbug as the backend for a full-featured 

  source-level debugger in Emacs.

 

* Move the JDEE from Sunsite to SourceForge with  JDEE 2.3.5.1 becoming
the new base CVS version of the JDEE.

 

I would be interested in your feedback on this plan as well as that of
Nascif, Jens, and other JDEE users.

 

Paul 

 

 

________________________________

From: Suraj Acharya [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Monday, June 26, 2006 8:50 PM
To: Jens Lautenbacher
Cc: jde-users
Subject: Re: Debugging with JDEE

 

I have no idea about when the next release will come out, sorry :-)

But in Paul's defense, the minor release that he put out recently is
definitely an improvement over the state of things before that. I guess
he has a day job to work on also, and cannot spend as much time on JDEE
as we'd like him to. 

But Paul, it would be helpful if those of us who'd like the process to
be speeded up could contribute in some way in getting releases out.
Maybe we could integ patches or test them out. 

Suraj

On 6/20/06, Jens Lautenbacher <[email protected] > wrote:

On Mon, 2006-06-19 at 23:39 -0700, Suraj Acharya wrote:
> I use jdb. I remember Paul mentioning on the list at some point that
> until the next major JDE release (2.3.6), the jdb interface is likely
> to be more usable than JDebug. 

Do you know anything more specific about when this will be? It's been a
long time without any real progress now, and I'm wondering if JDE is
more or less dead? As far as I can see, not even external stuff (like 
your truly excellent jde-usages) is being integrated into CVS...

Maybe you know more about the current plan?

        jtl