Python/Debugging

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Debugging Python code

=========

A commonly used trick is to import the Python debugger at some point where you would like to do debugging. Just add something like this:

{{{ import pdb pdb.set_trace() }}}

and Python will drop into the Python debugger, allowing you to inspect variables, execute code, step into/next/continue, etc. The commands are pretty similar to those of gdb.

Debugging Python extensions

===============

As Python extensions are written in C, it is usually not sufficient to rely on pdb when debugging extensions.

GDB


The following gdb macros (to be placed in ~/.gdbinit) allow you to easily inspect the reference count of python objects, their string representation as used in Python and the python stack from within gdb.


Valgrind


There is a suppressions file for Python's memory manager (pymalloc). It is part of the Python source tree, and distributed inside of the Python package in some distributions (Debian/Ubuntu put it in the "python" package, in /usr/lib/valgrind/python.supp). With this suppressions file enabled you *should* have no valgrind warnings from Python with any of the Samba modules loaded. See also /usr/share/doc/python2.4/README.valgrind for a more detailed explanation.

Example usage:

{{{ valgrind --suppressions=/usr/lib/valgrind/python.supp python foo.py }}}