Improving Dr Konqi for developers

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Hi all,

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 13:17, Milian Wolff <mail at milianw.de> wrote:
> Hello people!
>
> Since GSOC is nearing an end, and I hope to have a bit more time afterwards, I
> wonder whether it would be OK if I'd try to improve Dr Konqi a bit more for
> developers.
>
> For me, the tool is invaluable since I can run my application and crash it
> (yay :)) without rerunning it in GDB or doing some esoteric GDB core stuff
> manually. It's really a big time saver.
>
> I do miss some features though, and wonder what you all think of them:
>
> 1) "jump to crash" button or similar. Dr Konqi is nice enough to insert
> [KCrash handler] in the BT, but so far I have to navigate there manually. Why
> not make that faster?

+1, that would be a big improvement.

> 2) "jump to thread" combobox or similar, see above, jumping to Thread X is
> sometimes also nice.

I rarely use that, since I only triage, so no opinion on it.

> 3) open file, when hovering a URL I'd sometimes like to open that one quickly,
> just like e.g. Konsole offers me to.

+1, would be nice

> 4) syntax highlighting. Ok well, you guys know me from Kate/KDevelop, I'm a
> color whore and think it would make it easier to grasp a few things. I won't
> embed Katepart of course, but QSyntaxHighlighter should be enough for the
> simple GDB backtrace format.

+1, it would really improve the gdb backtraces.
>
> Now, why do I write this stuff here, instead of just implementing it:
>
> - I don't know whether you would also find it useful as a developer
> - I'm not sure whether all this should be shown to John Doe who just wants to
> report a bug. Maybe it even increases the overwhelming effect of this dialog,
> and I don't want that. So ideas on how to make it optional maybe would be
> welcome (some non-UI setting maybe?)

I don't think it would disturb the plain user, since many don't even
know they can ask to install debugging symbols or that the stars
indicate if a backtrace is valid. Those who do read might even see
this as an improvement.

> - I know that Dr Konqi must be rock solid, and introducing new features might
> mean new bugs. So maybe instead of changing Dr Konqi I should put this into a
> different application (I'd then probably just write a KDevelop plugin for
> backtrace files).

both solutions are valid IMHO, but I would love to see this in Dr. Konqi.


Regards, Myriam

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