Samstag, Januar 31, 2015

My first ever patch for GDB

I have recently started contributing to KDevelop, my favorite free software IDE, effectively taking over maintainership of the GDB plugin. In the course of this work, I noticed a rather silly little thing in GDB.

Unfortunately, the current "Launch Configuration" dialog in KDevelop makes it rather easy to accidentally set a directory as the name of the executable to be launched. That's a whole issue in itself which needs to be addressed at some point. For now, my attention was caught by the following, rather self-contradictory error message:
(For the non-German-speakers: "Erfolg" means "success".) It turns out that this is not KDevelop's fault, as the second part of the error message is generated by GDB itself. So I dug into the sources to GDB, which I had lying around anyway, and was able to find and fix the cause of the confusion without too much effort. The result is bug #17911 and its attachment. It's a trivial patch, but it feels good anyway. Now it'll have to be picked up by some of the maintainers...

2 Kommentare:

daveagp hat gesagt…

Congratulations! Given that it's GDB, I would say that this is basically a guarantee of immortality.

Nicolai Hähnle hat gesagt…

Hey Dave,

thanks! And nice to hear from you again out of he blue. Hope you and Sara are doing fine :)