state of remote debugging?

greggjensen wrote on Wed Apr 30 20:35:52 MEST 2008:

I am doing perl development on a Solaris x86 platform, which isn't a supported
eclipse platform.  I see that there is some support within EPIC for remote
run/debug scripts.   Is this feature in a state that it could be used for
day to day perl development?  Or, is this meant for single use purposes?

jploski wrote on Wed Apr 30 22:09:03 MEST 2008:

There is support for remote debugging, but not so much for remote running
(you're supposed to launch your scripts on the remote machine using a wrapper
provided by EPIC - this is not as convenient as local launching). You have
to take care to keep your remote and local files synchronized. This is easy
for project files, but not so easy for entire Perl installations. So you
may run into problems when stepping into/through remote modules in a different
version than your local one - their displayed source is taken from the local
installation, not from the remote machine.

You might also encounter firewall issues (remote debugging requires connectivity
from the remote machine to the Eclipse one). You can set up ssh port forwarding
ports for 5000-5003 to work around this.

Generally, I think it's better to write and test portable Perl code on the
supported platform, but don't be afraid to use the remote debugging functionality
if/when you run into problems on the remote machine.

greggjensen wrote on Wed Apr 30 23:10:54 MEST 2008:

Thanks for the quick reply and I understand.  

It is probably like oil and water, but would RSE help EPIC remote debugging?

jploski wrote on Thu May  1 14:10:35 MEST 2008:

Yes, I think integrating RSE + EPIC would be a good idea. Conceptually,
there is no difference between remote debugging of C programs and remote
debugging of Perl programs, and as far as I know, RSE is designed to be
a general framework. An advantage of EPIC (concerning installation, upgrades,
and conceptual simplicity) is that it has no dependencies besides of the
core Eclipse platform. I think it might be a good idea to rely on RSE "behind
the scenes", but a bad idea to require EPIC users to become aware of RSE.