[H-GEN] Is GnuCash ready for prime-time? Was: RFC: SCO

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

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Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> writes:

> On 2003-06-17, Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
>> Imagine being able to see something misbehave and *immediately*
>> connecting a debugger and having the sources *right there* to refer
>> to!  I'm pretty sure it'd be possible to do this with a BSD---Greg?
>> Any opinions?
>
> Well, it would be possible to do this with any system that you
> chose to build entirely from sources

I was very disappointed to see how hard it was to do with the Debian
packaging stuff; as I recall it wasn't easy to install the software
into the correct locations *and* have the debugger aware of where the
sources were at the same time.

> I would not want general systems built with debugging symbols
> and all the other space- and time-wasting flimflam that would
> make this kind of thing work.

I've probably been a bit unclear---I wouldn't necessarily leave
debugging symbols in *every* program:  some are big enough already and
others aren't that critical.  Others, like the news fetching software,
are critical to my environment[1] and won't suffer unduly from the
increased disk requirement or speed problems.

>> In the particular case of leafnode, because I had to fetch, compile,
>> and install the software to try to track down the problem, my window
>> closed and to this day I don't know what was *really* going on.
>
> If you really wanted to know, you could have setup two boxes
> with their clocks set back to the time when the error happened
> and repeated the test ;-) 

Oh, trust me, I really wanted to know---it was stopping me from
reading *USENET*!!!  If I had two computers to throw at a problem like
that right now I would be having a lot more fun.

> After all, time-sensitive bugs are common and this is basically the
> only way to track them.

True enough.  I was very annoyed when the problem just "went away".
Can't wait for the switch back to normal time.

jason

[1] : Leafnode has a very nasty bug that makes it occasionally
      mismatch article headers and bodies; it was a long time before I
      saw this problem for myself and had to conclude it wasn't merely
      my partner's newsreader playing up.
-- 
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                                 http://www.panix.com/~jasonp

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