DSDP/DD/Phone 22-Mar-2007

Location & Time

When: Thrusday, March 22nd, 10:30 AM (EDT) Where: Dial In: (888) 545-8370 , International: (770) 659-3936, passcode: 5107492128# Duration: 1 hour

Agenda

Introductions

Attendees (planning):

• Dominique Toupin (Ericsson)
• Doug Gaff (Wind River)
• Doug Schafer (QNX)
• Francis Litterio (Wind River)
• Francois Chouinard (Ericsson)
• Ken Rayall (Nokia)
• Marc Khouzam (Ericsson)
• Martin S (TI)
• Pawel Piech (Wind River)
• Veenu Khanna Verma (Ericsson)

Documentation to help get familiar with Eclipse Debugging and DSF

Unfortunately there is a long and steep learning curve when starting to develop debuggers for Eclipse. On the upside there is a lot of excellent documentation to help with this task. I recommend looking at these materials in the order listed below.

http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Launch-Framework/launch.html

Article describing the Eclipse launch framework and a walk-through example of how to use it. Launch framework is a rather un-usual feature of Eclipse debugger, which causes some confusion to a lot of new Eclipse users and developers. Understanding the launch framework is essential in making sense of the overall debugger framework.

http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Debugger/how-to.html

This article walks through creating a simple debugger with basic features using the "standard" eclipse debug model. Although the provisional "flexible hierarchy" interfaces introduced in Eclipse 3.2 make it possible to by-pass the standard model and this is what DSF does, understanding the standard debug model is still essential for backward compatibility and interoperability with third party tools.

http://www.eclipsecon.org/2007/index.php?page=sub/&id=3701

Presentation from a tutorial on Eclipse debugging from EclipseCon 2007. It contains a presentation with a very broad overview (214 slides) of debugger features, as well as a few examples on general debugger features, memory view, and flexible hierarchy. This tutorial is a lot to digest at one time, but it's also a very valuable resource in learning to use the debug framework.

http://dsdp.eclipse.org/help/latest/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.dd.dsf.doc/docs/dsf_white_paper.html

DSF online documentation. The documents under this link are somewhat out of date with respect to specific package and class names, but in principle they are very relevant.

• White Paper - Paper describing goals technology goals and principles
• Services Model - Design document describing the framework for declaring and using services in DSF.
• Concurrency Model - Design document describing the threading model of DSF
• Data Model - Design document describing the data model to be used with DSF. This document is least complete of the design document, but it does touch on some of the important topics. It is best to study the flexible hierarchy framework and examples before looking at the DSF Data Model.
• GDB/MI Implementation Setup Guide - A brief list of steps to install and run DSF GDB/MI implementation.

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/dsdp/dd/2007-1-9_Toronto_DSF_ViewModel.ppt

Presentation further describing the DSF Data/View model. This presentation was given at the last DD meeting in Toronto on January 10th, 2007. It gives an overview of the DSF integration with flexible hierarchy framework.

http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/org.eclipse.dd.dsf/plugins/org.eclipse.dd.dsf.examples/?root=DSDP_Project

Examples of use of DSF framework features. Studying these examples is the easiest way to get started on understanding and using DSF.

Upcoming topics of discussion for DSF design

Our intention is to make the DSF design process as open as much as possible. Below is the list of design topics that we need to cover in near future. We would like to discuss the timing and format of the meetings to talk about these.

• View model extensions to support locals variables view model implementation (no bug yet)
• Selecting expression format for display in views (no bug yet)
• MI command caching and coalescing infrasctructure bug 159688

Staying up to date

Bugzilla allows users to be CC'd whenever another user receives an email from bugzilla. This is done by addign the user's email address in "Users to watch" text box found on the bugzilla user preferences page. This mechanism can be used to monitor new bugs entered for certain projects. For DSF, I would recomment watching the following inboxes:

• dd.general-inbox@eclipse.org
• platform-debug-inbox@eclipse.org
• cdt-debug-inbox@eclipse.org

At this time in the release cycle, I receive about 20 emails daily on these accounts.