Okay, so it looks like getting the ole "breakpoint" working isn't
going to happen. Everyone seems to just push for making the switch
over to "ruby-debug". I've decided to go with the flow, but have to
say that I feel like I'm giving up a lot. The nice thing about a
breakpoint was it dropped you into the IRB where you could interact
with your code by entering in code that is immediately executed
bringing back the results. With ruby-debug, this doesn't seem
possible. Why aren't more people upset about the switch? Am I
missing something?
Okay, so it looks like getting the ole "breakpoint" working isn't
going to happen. Everyone seems to just push for making the switch
over to "ruby-debug". I've decided to go with the flow, but have to
say that I feel like I'm giving up a lot. The nice thing about a
breakpoint was it dropped you into the IRB where you could interact
with your code by entering in code that is immediately executed
bringing back the results. With ruby-debug, this doesn't seem
possible. Why aren't more people upset about the switch? Am I
missing something?
Maybe because you can always type 'irb' once you hit a breakpoint or
are somehow in the ruby-debug console. You get a full irb with all the
environment you had up to that point whee you stopped. 'exit' takes
you back to (rdb:1) where you can set breakpoints, examine stuff look
at the stack frame and continue.
Also, if you issuing the command "set autoirb" will cause you to go
into irb every time the debugger is entered. In effect the debugger
issues that command. Personally I don't use this, but it's there.
What I do however use is "set autoeval" which instructs the debugger
to text that isn't a debugger command like a Ruby expression. I put
this in my .rdebugrc to have this turned on by default. In the current
version in svn, .rdebugrc is also read via Debugger.debugger. Also the
current version in svn, those "set" commands are more gdb-like, so you
can say "set autoeval on" or "set autoeval off" and "show autoeval"
and get output in the format more or less as you would in gdb.
I've started a manual for the version of ruby-debug that's in svn and
can be found at ruby-debug However since
there are a number of changes in the svn, I'm not sure how useful it
is for the last released version.
