Re: Debugging with JDEE

Hi Paul,

+1 to Jens' praise of your work.

+1 to dropping JDEBug. It's bugginess has hidden its full potential from 
me so, if it were dropped, I'd wonder what I missed. Just the same, I 
find jdb adequate for my needs.

+1 to open-sourcing JDEE. However, I'd make a brazen, self-serving pitch 
that you consider java.net[1]. You can choose SVN as your code control 
environment.

Regards,
-- 
Ed Mooney         |Sun Microsystems, Inc.|Time flies like
Java Web Services |UBUR02-201            |an arrow, but
[email protected] |1 Network Drive       |fruit flies like
781-442-0459      |Burlington, MA  01803 |a banana. Groucho

[1] http://www.java.net/request_project.csp

Paul Kinnucan wrote:
> 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
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