The sorry state of the GDB plugin

[Milian Wolff]

Hey all,

I just spent some hours looking into the unit tests of GDB and the state is 
pretty bad. It failed for months on our CI and no one looked into it. Turns 
out these issues are real and probably effect people that try to actually use 
it:

a) I see tons of dialogs popup like this: The debugger component encountered 
an internal error while processing reply from gdb. (MI type_error exception). 
Turns out that is due to the GDB plugin blindly passing GDB responses to the 
GDBCommand handlers. There is no validation that e.g. a -break-list command 
receives only "^done,BreakpointTable*" kind of responses. That leads to utter 
confusion.

b) testRemoteDebugInsertBreakpoint is also completely broken. It expects two 
breakpoints where we have three in our model. But GDB internally, as shown by 
the BreakpointTable response, only knows one - the one from the runScript, and 
none of those added from within KDevelop.

There are probably more issues. I'd love if someone could step up and take 
care of the GDB plugin. With Vlas, Niko etc. gone the plugin really needs a 
new maintainer that is willing to invest the time in fixing the issues it has.

Bye
-- 
Milian Wolff
mail at milianw.de
http://milianw.de