Hello, I am the current maintainer of EPIC (http://e-p-i-c.sf.net), searching in despair for a sensible way of reliably breaking in "require"d source files (and some "use"d ones, too).
Let me provide a few simple examples first: require '/some/abs/path/foo.pm'; require 'foo.pm'; require '/some/abs/path/../foo.pm'; All the paths above when passed to Cwd::abs_path() resolve to /somewhere_else/abs/path/foo.pm (/some happens to bea symlink to /somewhere_else). I want to set a breakpoint in /somewhere_else/abs/path/foo.pm. I don't care how this file is referred to in the sources, I just want the debugger to break in it! However, if I pass the above canonical absolute path to "b load", it won't break, obviously, because Perl uses one of the strange paths to refer to the file in %INC. Hence I won't get a chance to set line breakpoints and EPIC users will rightfully complain about bugs. I thought I could work around this issue using a custom watchfunction to do the path resolution. I did. It worked, but it made the debugger potentially orders of magnitude slower (even an empty watchfunction has this effect). Wrong approach. Next I thought I could just hack perl5db.pl to break on all loaded filenames and do the path resolution then myself. Well, it seems to work and is faster, but it has an unfortunate side-effect that "step" commands break in strange places instead of finishing where they would have without this additional hack. Unlike with "continue", where I can just keep the debugger going in case it breaks on a line without a real breakpoint, I cannot do the same with "step" commands, simply because I would have to know where they are supposed to finish "naturally". I am now considering throwing away perl5db.pl or rewriting significant portions of it. But maybe someone has a better idea? Regards, Jan Ploski
