The Drawing Board
Overview
Winpdb has always been a little spartan. On purpose actually, since I have always preferred to invest my available energy on endlessly improving and fixing the debugger engine (rpdb2). In fact, the Winpdb GUI was originally intended as a simple reference front end to rpdb2.
The time, however, has come to do some refactoring on Winpdb and add some missing usability features to make life simpler and more productive for its users.
Usability Features
The following is a list of required usability features in Winpdb. Each item should be expanded and linked to a dedicated Wiki page to discuss options and design:
- Hovering with the mouse over a variable name in the source window should pop a tip with its value.
- The source window should have good search functionality.
- Better copy paste functionality.
- usable right click context dialog.
- Implement a settings dialog.
Go over the feature request list at sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=760562&group_id=145018&func=browse) for interesting missing features.
- Some other stuff that people will suggest here.
Debugging Remotely
One of the features I have found useful was remote debugging, a la rpdb2. Breaking out rpdb2 into a separate, 'debug-server' package may be useful, as loading X, wxpython, etc. is a bit of overkill when rpdb2 works just fine on it's own, with a remote full install. -- I submit this for consideration, not as a requirement, as I can (and have) broken it out by myself. -- Perhaps just stating the steps required on the wiki/documentation would be enough. --- Lastebil