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Re: [cdt-dev] globals in variables view

Thank you all for your feedback.  I think the concensus is:

1) Important
  - Many users don't like to deal with a separate view for globals.
  - Some debuggers provide the ability to identify which globals are in scope in a local function, though current CDT variables view does not support this feature yet.

2) No direct answer but a clear feeling of discomfort with the expressions view in general: "Expressions view feels cumbersome", "dealing with a second view is inconvenient".

3) A good idea, but that's what the standard Variables view should be.



I think this is convincing enough to add the global variables support to the view just as CDT has it for feature parity, but personally I think there's a lot of workflow issues with the solution as it stands.  In the long term I think they'll need to be addressed.  To enumerate some of my concerns:
a) As I already mentioned simply showing globals in the variables duplicates and competes with the Expressions view.
b) Dragging a global symbol from the Modules view to the Variables view will never work, although it could be made to work with the expressions view.
c) CDT serializes global view selections with the launch configuration (as far as I know).  This won't scale well for debuggers that connect to multiple processors with a single launch, or for debuggers that handle fork and exec.  Also, DSF views are intended to work with debuggers that don't use the launch framework.
d) Globals?  Why not also Registers?

Cheers,
Pawel

Pawel Piech wrote:
Hi All,
I am considering a bug in DSF which asks for showing global variables in the variables view (bug 219040).  I am somewhat conflicted by this feature, because in our (Wind River's) product and in others that I've worked with, the Expressions/Watch window is the window used to display global variables, where Variables/Locals view is used for showing arguments and locals.

So I have three questions:

1) How important is it to have globals in the variables view.

2) Is the problem with showing globals in the Expressions view that it does not have the same features as the variables view (column support, change highlighting, etc?).

3) Is what's really missing a "smart" combined variables view which could show local variables, selected global variables, as well as "watched" local variables which are enabled only a given local variable is in scope?

Thanks,
Pawel
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