20070221 meeting notes

[Elena Zannoni <elena dot zannoni at oracle dot com>]

My notes, as usual.


Attendees:

Andrew, Mark, Phil, Mike, Sami, Nurdin, Behedad, Tim, Rick, Jonathan,
Kris, Elena

goals in 3 to 6 months:

RH:
command line utitilites: make more robust like getting backtraces
getting GUI to point where users can achieve basics operations

Oracle: 
getting something in the hands of some users when things are working a
bit better asap. There is no specific goal, aside getting basic workflows
working correctly, and hooking things up together better.
Looking currently at 64 bit environment.
Oracle doesn't want to have "oracle goals", there shouldbe project goals.
Lengthy discussion about power users vs. naive users: RH targets naive users,
while Oracle believe the real users will be experts as well.

Spent 15 minutes in collective silence waiting for a build to finish
so that there can be a frysk for the vnc session.  Suggestion for next
time, get this ready before the confcall please. Or use the time to
discuss other agenda items.

People agreed that sending status mail to the frysk mailing list is a
good thing. Would help keeping the meeting shorter.

Mike: thread control demo in gui, stepping threaded programs.

focus is on first thread in the stack. however there isn't a thread
highlighted in the stack. It should be. If you do an operation it
needs to apply to a specific thread, the one selected, which needs to
be highlighted.  Stack should have exactly only one element highighted
at the time.  There is no API to highlight things on the stack.

Continue all threads or continue just that one thread? What is the
best model?  All stepping operations apply only to the current thread,
except continue, which would apply to all threads. Or there should be
2 continue buttons, one for continue all, one for continue current
thread only.  Conclusion: add a "continue all" button to main toolbar.

Sami: possibly add a root of the stack "tree" being the process, if
that is highlighted, then continue all, otherwise continue only
selected thread. Kind of hard for users. Idea was dismissed.

single thread vs. thread groups continue: What should the icons do
when there is only one thread?  Should the layout of the buttons
change depending whether there is a single thread or several? Graying
out icons seems more sensible.

Thread selecting window for stepping, there are checkboxes and
highlights, kind of confusing. Also there is a step button here, what
happens if you use the step in the toolbar instead? They are wired to
the same thing, they will step the selected threads. Selection of
threads is done using the checkboxes, highlighting should go away.
What is the main thread? There is no distinction in that window.

The gimp has a floating toolbar, maybe we should do the same for
thread operations. Floating toolbar can be a problem because can get
lost in the screen. 

How to indicate which thread has been stopped. When you click stop
which thread has been stopped, there is no visual cue.  Also w/o
having the thread toolbar/window opened, pressing stop should stop all
threads, while user can override the behavior by selecting a single
thread in the thread window, and then stop will stop just the selected
thread. (same idea as stepping).

Discussion on what the behavior of frysk should be when you are
examining a frame that is not the innermost one, and you say "next".
Gdb would next the innermost function, while Cagney would expect to
next the function that is currently being examined.  Nurdin's idea to
have step button greyed out, and leave only next button active.

No time left to discuss project status.
Discussion will resume in email.