From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <EB4D8D69.7E7E90E6@mail.gmail.com>
From: Russ Cox <russcox@gmail.com>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
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Subject: [9fans] more plan 9 ports, including acid
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 22:52:05 -0400
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There are a lot of changes available in the CVS repository
for the Plan 9 ports tree.  There is also a new tarball.

Among the changes:

	- 9term won't echo passwords anymore (thanks to
		Axel Belinfante)
	- UTF8 input support (thanks to David Tolpin)
	- added comm, gzip, bzip2, look, plot, graph
		(thanks to Taj Khattra)
	- many little fixes to rio (thanks to Axel Belinfante)
	- added htmlfmt (thanks to William Josephson)
	- added fmt, tweak
	- a first stab at some manual pages

The biggest new piece is db and acid, though they're
not quite as portable as I would like.  They run on all
the supported systems, but they're only really useful for 
debugging FreeBSD and Linux x86 binaries at the moment.
(That is, you can debug x86 binaries on any supported
system.)  OtherBSD x86 binary support should be easy to add.
The Mac OS part is done except that stack traces are
very hard and not implemented -- you can look at binaries
and data, just not stack traces.  Adding support for SunOS
binaries is probably easy if you understand register windows,
which I don't.

Acid works well enough on the x86 systems to debug
multithreaded programs using -lthread.  It handles
dynamic libraries reasonably and uses the stabs or
dwarf type info embedded in the binaries being debugged.
The acid(1) man page has some high-level details.
You don't really want to know the low-level details.

/usr/local/plan9/src/acid/Notes details the changes
to the acid language that didn't fit into the man page.
(I haven't updated philw's manual.)

Enjoy.
Russ