[vlc-devel] Building a debug version of VLC

[Ed Sutton]

Hi Mark,

> Thanks, I am working some more the gdb/ddd and I see that if I attach
> to the process after I have performed some operations that the modules
> begin to fill in, Is this the way to use the debugger with VLC?

How, do you attach to a running process with gdb?

I have been trying to debug into some VLC ffmpeg modules in order to learn how to implement a frame-based decoder.  I am a Linux newbie and I find gdb a challenge.  I tried some gui front-ends; DDD and Insight, but neither seemed to work or were intuitive. 

I think a number of the modules I want to investigate are not loaded until run time.  I have been setting progressive break point with some success.  Gdb usually tells me it does not know about the source file but asks me if I want it to break in a future shared load and when I answer "yes" it sometimes seems to find it for some source files.  

I am trying to set breakpoints in \ffmpeg\lbavcodec\mjpegdec.c but can't seem to find the trick so that gdb understands the symbolic information.  When I configured ffmpeg, I added an enable-debug line. Then before I did a make, I set the CFLAGS environment variable = "-g".  Maybe I need to re-check my steps and rebuild to get proper symbolic information?

Thanks in advance for any tips,

-Ed