[squeak-dev] MVC debugging

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Tue Sep 7 01:29:01 UTC 2010


On Mon, Sep 06, 2010 at 04:46:24PM -0700, Andreas Raab wrote:
> Hi -
> 
> I'm interested in getting MVC into a reasonably usable shape to be able 
> to play with unloading parts (or the entirety) of Morphic. However, it 
> seems that the debugger is badly broken which leaves one hanging as soon 
> as something goes wrong.
> 
> Does anyone know when the MVC debugger has last worked in the recorded 
> history of mankind? :-) Or even better what needs to be fixed to get it 
> working again?
> 
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas

I think that the debugger (which is the critical thing), as well as a few
other UI things, are simply missing some necessary ToolBuilder support.
It's a bit tricky to figure this out because one cannot open a debugger
to figure out what's wrong, but my guess is that if we can get the debugger
working again that the rest of the broken UI elements would be fixable.

The other thing that seems fundamentally broken is that input events
(keyboard events etc) do not seem to be getting delivered in a timely
fashion, at least on Linux. I think Windows may be better, but there is
clearly something wrong in this area.

MVC has deteriorated slowly and steadily since say Squeak 3.6 or so.
It sort of worked in Squeak 3.8, and started getting badly messed up
after that. I would definitely like to help fix this if possible, and
I see no reason that MVC cannot be made healthy (and fully reloadable)
in Squeak trunk.

I think the initial challenge would be to add enough ToolBuilder
support for the debugger to make it possible to evaluate 'self halt'
in a workspace in an MVC project.

A few things may also have changed with respect to process scheduling
that may have an impact on MVC, such that in some circumstances Processor
may be left with no schedulable processes in MVC. This may be a side
effect of the missing ToolBuilder support (but I'm completely guessing
at this point).

Dave




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