[Lazarus] disable the debugger capturing the OutputDebugString() messages

[Bernd]

2010/7/20 Mattias Gaertner <nc-gaertnma at netcologne.de>:

>> So please enlighten me. What are the benefits of such a debug monitor? Perhaps I am missing something.

Sometimes you simply don't have a stdout to write to. I just have one
such occasion where I'm working on a plugin dll for another
application on windows and I didn't find a way to write to stdout an
the other half of the plugin which is written in the application's
built in scripting language uses OutputDebugString() for all debugging
output. On windows this is simply the most comfortable way to quickly
spew out some debug messages from any kind of application and have
them all nicely arrive in one central easily accessible place and
displayed and filtered in realtime. Many windows programmers use this
API because it is so much easier than having to experience the pain of
using the windows command prompt to navigate through folders or
installing all the cygwin tools to do even the most basic command line
stuff like tail -f | grep and friends.

It is true that with a standalone Lazarus application on windows and
how things currently are the best (and only) available option is
writeln to stdout or a log file, simply because the windows debug
output API is sabotaged by GDB's way of not recognizing these messages
and treating them as what they really are.

Most often (and also all other languages I use) I find myself simply
completely not using a debugger at all and doing all my debugging by
outputting simple messages to trace the program flow and some
variables I am interested in. And on Windows I like to output them to
where it is most easy to watch them and filter them, and this is
certainly *not* stdout. And this is exactly what I'm currently doing
in Lazarus: I have disabled the debugger because it will disturb my
debugging.

It would just be nice to have this all somehow unified and more
*comfortably* usable in Lazarus. On windows I almost exclusively use
OutputDebugString() for everything that is (or runs inside) a GUI app
and has no stdout available (basically everything in windows). Only
the Lazarus/GDB combination will not easily allow this and this is
because GDB originates from the *ix world and there no such API exists
and working from the command line and with log files is a hundred
times easier with all the available tools and much more the norm than
in windows.

After All Lazarus is a graphical IDE and it should not force me to
mess around with the clumsy windows command line and/or 3rd pary tools
to tail and grep log files. comfortable outputting to a debug monitor
in a GUI environment where there simply is no easily accessible stdout
and no easy way to tail -f some file should be the norm in a GUI based
development+debugging environment.

The first step and immediate help would be to filter all &"Warning: "
messages from GDB output and display them separately. and in parallel
maybe try to convince the GDB people for some future release of GDB to
recognize these messages correctly as what they really are, label them
separately and not throw them as ordinary warnings to stdout.