[wingide-users] Debugging zope with wing3

[Dominic Hiles]

Dear Stephan,

--On 15 June 2007 10:28 -0400 Wingware Support <support at wingware.com> wrote:

> Danny Bloemendaal wrote:
>> Ok, today I decided to give 3.0 a try. All looks nice but debugging zope
>> turned out to be virtually impossible. When I want to step through code
>> I end up in seemingly random places. So I step through some code, press
>> F6 and expect to end up on the next line but instead I jump to
>> completely different places after which I cannot see in the stack where
>> I am. I completely lose track. And the debugger seems to listen to all
>> ports which makes it hardly impossible to access zope outside the debug
>> process while debugging some other zope/plone code. And it makes
>> everything go sooo slowly.
>
> Yes, there are still some problems debugging Zope if you use WingDBG.
> You could debug it without WingDBG under Wing 3.0, and it may work
> reasonably in some cases if you also set the Stop All Threads option
> in Project Properties (under the Debug tab) to Stop One Thread.  However,
> it still could stop on a breakpoint in any thread so doesn't act quite
> the same as in Wing 2.1.  The Stop One Thread option causes Wing to stop
> only one thread at a time, but it still has its tracer in all of them
> and may be slow if there are a lot of threads.
>
> I'm not sure what the jumping around you saw was, unless threads were
> context switching as you stepped through the code.
>
> We're working on it... most likely the way to debug Zope will continue
> to be with WingDBG and we'll fix that to work on only one thread as
> before.
>

It would a shame if the new multi-threaded debugging support wasn't 
available by some means through WingDBG. I use Wing pretty much exclusively 
with Zope. It's a fantastic tool for debugging many problems as well as 
writing code. However, the only problems that it's failed on of late have 
been thread-related issues; I've resorted to pdb in these circumstances.

Unrelated, I'm seeing more frequent occurrences of Wing "hanging" at 100% 
CPU whilst debugging in Zope - it always returns, but there can be pauses 
of a minute or two between each breakpoint. I recall seeing some reference 
to problems when debugging objects with a C ExtensionClass as their base - 
I guess this may account for it, but was curious to know if there are any 
other known explanations (and whether other users find the same).

Thanks,

Dominic

----------------------------------------------------------------
Dominic Hiles
Senior Technical Researcher
Internet Development Group
Institute for Learning and Research Technology
University of Bristol