Python GDB
There's a significant amount of documentation of using GDB on the Python wiki: but first, I need to get debug symbols for Python on Arch linux.
Getting debug symbols for Arch linux (abandoned)
The Arch Wiki has a lot of helpful documentation about this (as expected), which recommends doing a custom package build:
pacman -S asp # Get ASP to work with ABS asp checkout python # Fetch the python PKGBUILD cp -r python/repos/repo-x86_64/PKGBUILD python-dbg
Added options\=(debug !strip) to the file to retain debug symbols.
Finally, to do makepkg I also had to download some dependencies (one
of which, deliciously, was GDB). I also had to accept the GPG key for
python, which is a slightly scary experience; I wonder if I could
simply have built my python checkout instead.
makepkg
Kicked off the actual build for python, which I expect to take some time and a significant number of cycles. The compilation ultimately failed with a failed ncurses test; and I can't say I'm excited about debugging those.
Simply building python locally
Cloning and building python master was far simpler and more convenient, nicely documented on the cpython devguide.
./configure --with-pydebug make -j4
Building also generates the magical python-gdb.py file in the root
directory, which extends GDB's with python to pretty print
python. This is also conveniently documented in the devguide.
DebuggingWithGDB discusses how to actually run a python program under GDB.
gdb python run <program>.py