Mailing-List: contact mod_dtcl-help@tcl.apache.org; run by ezmlm
Message-ID: <005a01c18e39$82b5b0f0$90b411ac@huckabeec>
From: "Craig Huckabee" <huck@spawar.navy.mil>
To: "Wojciech Kocjan" <wojciech@kocjan.org>,
        "David N. Welton" <davidw@dedasys.com>
Cc: <mod_dtcl@tcl.apache.org>
References: <3C23C553.8000409@kocjan.org>
 <87u1ue42yf.fsf@dedasys.com><3C29C778.8010607@kocjan.org>
 <87adw62kzv.fsf@dedasys.com>
Subject: Re: mod_dtcl on Windows98 again
Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2001 13:16:59 -0500
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit


> Wojciech Kocjan <wojciech@kocjan.org> writes:
>
> > > Tried debugging it?
>
> > How? ;-)
>
> > I never debugged a thing on Windows...
>
> Neither have I - maybe someone else can comment?  Does it crash, by
> the way, when you run it with '-X' or whatever the windows equivalent
> is?

-X is the same on Win32.

Debugging is a problem.  Since Apache is built with VC++ and mod_dtcl is
built with MingW32, and they don't share a compatible debug symbol format,
the debugger gets "lost" when trying to trace program execution.  So, it is
impossible to trace a problem in the traditional sense using a debugger.

I got some good results by using GDB to attach, run, then print out the
actual exception with breakpoint, then printing out the call stack.  That
gave me a good ball park as to where the problems were.  So far, though,
every problem I've hit has been related to a bad script, configuration file,
some other module, or the machine's setup.

Those playing along at home might ask "Why not build mod_dtcl with VC++ ?"
It can be built that way, but the binary produced is unusable.  I tried
tracking that one down once, ended up getting nowhere.  I can say it isn't
in the optimizer - a bloated unoptimized binary produced by VC++ doesn't
work either.  Seems like there was some pointer mangling going on in the
compiler, but it was over a year ago when I was actively looking at it.

Since Tcl & mod_dtcl can be built with MingW32, I think it'd be better to
have the Apache sources patched to support that build environment.  I
started coming up with all of the patches once, but stopped due to lack of
time on my behalf and apparent lack of interest from the Apache core (no
e-mail response).

What version of Apache are you using, btw ?

--Craig