Improving quality of life in GDB

Having spent quite a few total hours in GDB over the past weeks it started to get boring to print *res->value.list->… etc over and over to see what weird value was harassing my tests. I had heard that GDB had gained Python support  some time ago and decided to write some useful tools for debugging XMMS2 related code.

This is now what it looks like when you print a xmmsv_coll_t:

(gdb) print *coll
$11 = {
  "attributes": {
    "type": "id"
  },
  "type": "XMMS_COLLECTION_TYPE_ORDER",
  "idlist": [],
  "operands": [
    {
      "attributes": {},
      "type": "XMMS_COLLECTION_TYPE_UNIVERSE",
      "idlist": [],
      "operands": []
    }
  ]
}

…and a regular xmmsv_t:

(gdb) print *fetch
$15 = {
  "type": "cluster-list",
  "data": {
    "type": "organize",
    "data": {
      "id": {
        "aggregate": "first",
        "type": "metadata",
        "get": [
          "id"
        ]
      }
    }
  },
  "cluster-by": "id"
}

The code is a bit under 100 lines of Python and should be a nice inspiration for people who still haven’t added this huge help to their projects. The code can be found here, and checked out via:

git clone git://git.xmms.se/xmms2/xmmsgdb.git