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Webservice Debugs Linux Binaries While-U-Wait

Posted by michael on from the laziness-and-impatience dept.

null-und-eins writes "A new webservice offers automatic debugging of Linux binaries. It takes a (with "-g" compiled) binary and two invocations where one fails and the other doesn't. The service repeatedly runs the two programs and tries to find the smallest difference between the two that causes the failure. Nice google-like interface with statistics about its own performance."

8 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. This is cool but by Safiire+Arrowny · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think this is a neat idea, but I wonder why it isn't a standalone program you can run yourself as well as/instead of a web interface.

    This is because I wonder why he wants to run the risk of running foreign binaries (sandbox or not) when he could have just not done that. There doesn't seem to be any advertising on the page, so that isn't it.

    Oh well, maybe he just thinks it's cooler this way, actually it kinda is, so long as it's safe for him I guess.

    1. Re:This is cool but by Andreas+Zeller · · Score: 5, Informative
      We're running AskIgor as a Web service (instead of a standalone program) for two reasons:
      • We get a set of programs for regression testing.
      • We get some ratings about the quality of our work.
      Although we did our best to give AskIgor a decent interface, it's still a research prototype, and there's many possible ways to go. Your submissions help us making these decisions, and guide our future development.
      --

      www.askigor.org - automated debugging service

  2. Re:Ok igor... by Andreas+Zeller · · Score: 5, Informative

    No problem. Igor runs your program in a sandbox whose contents get restored with each new submission.

    --

    www.askigor.org - automated debugging service

  3. Re:poor admin... by Andreas+Zeller · · Score: 5, Informative

    Most people coming from /. just have a look at the main site. By redirecting, we reduce traffic by about 50% and Apache load by 75%. If you want to go beyond (and maybe submit some buggy program), you're welcome!

    --

    www.askigor.org - automated debugging service

  4. Re:So... by bmorris · · Score: 5, Funny

    FYI, your problem is the extra "a" in "baar".

  5. Open-Source Community: Beta=Flaky, Mature=Stable by phorm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You must be joking. While some of the more "mature" projects are definately solidly coded, some of the others are nightmares. Try mixing several different coding styles, nights coding on only caffeine, starting, stopping, and losing your place...leaving debug to-fix-later code in by accident...

    Open source suffers the same problems as closed. In some projects moreso, as the variance of different coding styles/standards-adherance can lead to very interesting things happening. Even some mature projects have this problem, I've heard of some common ones where a rewrite was considered, because as the code evolved and was added to, the author(s) learned much better coding as it progressed but left the core a bit flaky.

  6. Re:Google-like... wait a second... by Andreas+Zeller · · Score: 5, Informative

    We're redirecting only if you come from /.

    --

    www.askigor.org - automated debugging service

  7. Re:Question by Andreas+Zeller · · Score: 5, Informative
    The core technology behind Igor is delta debugging, a general method to determine the difference between a working and a failing scenario.

    While not applying AskIgor (being a huge mix of Python, PHP, and SQL) on itself, we have applied delta debugging on various parts of AskIgor to detect failure-inducing code changes, and especially failure-inducing GDB commands.

    We're currently working on Eclipse plugins written in Java, and working on Java - and these will work 100% on themselves.

    --

    www.askigor.org - automated debugging service