On 4/6/22 10:47, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
On Wed, Apr 06 2022, COGONI Guillaume wrote: I really don't mind having some guide for VSCode in our developer documentation, but I think if we (as a free software project) are recommending proprietary software we should put that in some context where we explain if/why it's needed, and if free alternatives are also suitable.
Note that VS Code is mostly open source (the pre-compiled binaries are proprietary, but the source code is MIT licenced, https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode). Not to be confused with Visual Studio, which is fully proprietary, but is a totally different tool (AFAIK, they only share the name).
I haven't used the VSCode integration you're documenting, but from the diff and the "gdb" mention I gather that this isn't using some "native" debugger of MSVC/VS's, but just using the VSCode editor as a wrapper for gdb?
Yes (gdb or lldb under the hood). As usual, it adds a GUI layer, but also a configuration layer where you specify how to launch the debugger in a launch.json file, and this is where the little script in contrib/ is handy to generate a launch.json adapted for Git.
If that's the case wouldn't it suffice to link to some generic getting started guide for debuggers? And e.g. recommend the GDB manual, maybe there's a better online reference (I read it locally), but e.g.: https://www.sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb.html
To me the point of the doc within Git's repo is to document git-specific aspects, and I agree that pointing to a generic doc is better than re-writing one. If I had written the patch I'd have made the general paragraph on debugger benefits a bit shorter, but it's already rather short so I'm OK with the patch in its current state.
Then if we're recommending GUI wrappers those are a dime a dozen, e.g. Emacs's GUD mode: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Debuggers.html
To me this is out of the scope of the patch (the real point to me was to increase the discoverability of contrib/vscode), but sure, documenting other GUI wrappers would be nice.
-- Matthieu Moy https://matthieu-moy.fr/
