[MacPerl] communal debugging system

[dick@cfcl.com (Dick Karpinski)]

Maybe there is enough knowledge in this community to seriously
attack the problem of reporting problems.  Apparently the free
software communities tend to use gnats as their bug coordination
system.  This is a simple email driven database that collects 
information from filled in forms that people email to a given
address.  But that's all it does.

We have language processing systems and modules and applications
all largely written in a very flexible and widely used language.
Doesn't that make it easy to add several levels of debugging
output that could be routed to circular buffers?  Wouldn't it
be pretty easy to collect the contents of such buffers and mail
it off to the collection site with the bug report?  Wouldn't it
be easy to present that information to an expert as an HTML page
with internal links to the various bits of information?  

In particular, wouldn't it be easy to present that information
back to the possibly naive user in a way that offers lots of
explanation for what has been happening just before the error
was encountered?

I think this applies to applications and would ease debugging
for individual programmers and for teams and for whole user
populations.  Is that right?  Are there problems that get in the
way of widely deploying such an enhanced debugging system?  Are
there problems that forbid applying the same approach to library
modules and versions of Mac-Perl itself?

Are there already tools for testing how much of your Perl
application has been exercised by the test cases you have made
so far?  Is there any advice offered for building in good testing
facilities?  Are there other, better ways to make problem solving
easier for cooperating communities including newbie programmers
doing things somewhat beyond their proven skills?

Dick

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