Re: Ruby

[Andrew Gaylard]

trans. (T. Onoma) wrote:
> Hi --
>
> What infomation do I need and where might I find it in order to extend ddd to 
> support Ruby?

(Firstly: I apologise for taking so long to respond to your question.)

Unfortunately, this is an easy question to ask, but an enormous
one to answer.  The problem is that DDD is not well designed to
allow for other debuggers to be added easily: the debugger-specific
stuff is all over the place.

What's needed is for the debugger-specifics to be contained in
a class for each debugger, and each of these classes would conform
to an interface (i.e. using an abstract base class).  In addition,
we'd need a mini-language similar to "expect" to handle the sending
of commands to the underlying debugger and parsing the responses.
80% of the bug reports I deal with involve updating DDD to handle
some minor change in the output of the underlying debugger, and
it's a real job to find the right place in the codebase.

(For the curious, jdb still suffers from this type of problem a
lot; DDD hasn't had any jdb updates for several years AFAIK.
I'm trying to nail some of these problems for 3.3.11.)

Re-engineering DDD this much is of course a massive amount of work.

This was mentioned last year some time as the direction in
which DDD should develop in the future, but there hasn't been
much momentum since that time.

If people are interested in contributing to this effort, then
let's get together, cut a new DDD-4.0 branch in CVS, and dive
in.  But I'm not going to do it just by myself.

Andrew.