Debugging a Delphi app on Wine

Question

Hi all,

I have a Delphi Windows app that dies horribly under Wine - doesn't even get to creating the main form. Porting to Free Pascal is not an option for various reasons.

Can I debug under Wine using Delphi's native means? If not, can I debug under Wine using gdb, and if so, how do I feed the debug info in Delphi format (Turbo Debugger probably) to gdb?

Finally, how can I detect Wine from a program? The Wine FAQ says I should not, but I don't think that fixing my app is high on the Wine guys' priority list, so I'd rather take the matters in my own hands.

I did not write the app, but I have the sources and a copy of Delphi.

Answer 1

You might be able to get the remote debugger to connect to the Wine app (never tried it), but that's asking a lot of Wine.

The first thing I'd try is using a stack tracing utility like the JCL debugging extensions. A stack trace may give you enough information to fix the issue without having to get debugging working under Linux.

Answer 2

I do believe you should be able to debug with gdb, but I don't know how you would feed all the Delphi sources to it. You would need to include all debug information in your EXE (including External debugger) to get started though.

I would recommend you get a logging utility that supports logging over TCP/IP. Two good ones are SmartInspect and CodeSite. Combine those with a stack tracing utility like the JCL provides and you might find it is a better solution then attaching the debugger anyway.

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Good luck on detecting Wine though. I would be curious to see what you come up with. Seems like it should be possible though.

Answer 3

If you've got the source code, then recompile with a bunch of debug messages in and try running it like you'd do on windows.

Wine has a lot of API's that are left unimplemented and you may have some luck installing extra packages at random with winetricks.

I had a similar problem using wine with our Delphi App, I needed to install the ODBC manager, which doesn't come in by default before I could get the thing to work.