[ic] Possibly helpful debugging tool

[Leon Harris]

Hi All.

I have been quite frustrated in getting interchange to work for me - I
needed a range of customisations to make it work under Australian
conditions, and I found the learning curve steep, despite excellent
help, particularly from people like Jim Balcom. I also found the
documentation difficult to navigate, and sometimes unclear. I believe
that this is mostly due to the complexity of interchange, rather than
any great failing of the interchange documentation writers, who have
made it *possible* to pick up interchange, and learn it.

One hassle I have is that I miss good debugging tools. I intend to write
a FAQ at some stage to help this (mostly for my partner, who will also
be working on ic once I learn it well enough to be able to earn a crust
from it). I particularly miss UNIX greats such as strace, the sysadmins
mate ( no source, no programmer,
just-what-the-hell-is-going-on-in-at-3-am-when-your-system-has-decided-that-not-
only-is-it-going-to-be-a-hung-system,-it-is-going-to-be-an-extremely-well-hung-
system,-and-you-are-screwed-type tool).

So I decided to do something about it.

I have written a tool called strace_listener which listens to a fifo
(/tmp/strcfifo) and starts, and stops a strace on a process. I have two
tags, stracestart and stracestop which start a strace on the process of
interchange parsing the page that the tag is on. Output is into
/tmp/stracelog$pid.
Advice is given to start, stop a strace, also to retrieve status and to
quit the listener. Start and stop work well, status sends its output to
the file rather than any tag. When I write the ic status tag, I will fix
the listener. This works for me. I now have to do some billable hours to
catch up on this last week, or I wont get to eat.

You can get the tool from ftp://quoll.com/pub/strace_listener

run pod2text|less  on it for detailed instructions.

Above all, enjoy. I hope this is of help.

goodnight.

Cheers,
leon
(it is 3am now, better leave while I can)