o Add local_install target to the module make system, to make it simple for users who download standalone modules to get them installed in their user account instead of in the system pike installation.
Perhaps a ~/.pikerc with some settings in it such as extra module paths would be nice too? Simple enough to fix at least.
o Dump pike backtraces on SIGSEGV.
How about dumping C backtraces also, when possible (probably limited to Linux?). I have code for this and it would be, especially combined with pike backtraces, quite useful in case you get sporadic crashes and can't always run with gdb. Example output:
Signal SIGQUIT received.
Stack dump: { ./hdb(print_backtrace+0x1d) [0x8063429] /lib/libpthread.so.0 [0x4fc3bfea] /lib/libc.so.6 [0x4f9f6288] ./hdb(main+0x30d) [0x809216d] /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xc7) [0x4f9e27a7] ./hdb(XMapRaised+0x39) [0x80624e1] }
Naturally the above happens at a stage where only main has been called so it's not so interesting. The addresses are easily used in gcc with `info line *ADDR' or with the addr2line command line tool (which doesn't handle dynamically loaded modules though).
/ David Hedbor
Previous text:
2003-10-02 17:06: Subject: Some tasks from the conference
Here's a list I made of various things to do that came up at the conference. It's not complete; especially it doesn't include the stuff that Martin Baehr kept track of on the whiteboards. Perhaps he can complete it with those things?
These items are both large and small. I've marked the ones I feel more personally responsible for, as well as those I think ought to be fixed before a 7.6 release.
Important enough to be finished before 7.6:
o Clean up the module make system.
o Document the module make system.
o Add local_install target to the module make system, to make it simple for users who download standalone modules to get them installed in their user account instead of in the system pike installation.
Other important things:
o Document the C API more. (mast, hopefully with help from others with the knowledge..)
o Describe memory handling in the manuals, i.e. refcounting vs gc:ing, various kinds of leaks and ways to combat them, etc. (mast)
o Transfer the pike-community.org contents to a Steam server c/o Martin Baehr.
Bug fixes:
o Fix the memory overwrite bug in the "uses" array in peep.c that David Gourdelier has discovered. (More info needed.)
o Fix the bug which caused a fatal in the gc for David Gourdelier. (More info needed.) (mast)
Not that important:
o Implement a variant of _locate_references that is more suited for normal pike programmers. For instance, it should return a data structure that describes the references to an object instead of dumping it all on stderr. (mast)
o Add a function or option to create_process that conveniently starts a pike interpreter with another pike script.
o Add a function to change the argv array of the pike process.
o Dump pike backtraces on SIGSEGV.
o Finish the implementation of the "variant" feature (i.e. runtime dispatch on function argument types).
o Fix odd indentation of the output from %O for e.g. arrays. (mast)
o Valgrind some more. (Apparently done by Nilsson now.)
o Fix LXR view of the pike source on the pike site.
o Implement this_function().
/ Martin Stjernholm, Roxen IS