Although my goal was to have the symbolstore.py patch approved for committal by week’s end, I am very close. Today I spent about 5 hours tweaking the patch as per the most recent comments.

What was done:

* Makefile now checks for the environment variable of PDBSTR_PATH to be set before assigning the flag to source index
* Several minor logic changes to the symbolstore.py like removing redundant file path fixing
* I finally understood what Ted was saying about using a temp filename before checking for VCSinfo. This small change made it possible to remove 3 lines of work-arounds that I had been doing 🙂
* The hard-coding of the path to the pdbstr.exe executable is gone and has been replaced by whatever is in the environment variable

A few glitches:

* Making changes to the Makefile that resulted in errors left me with a makefile that couldn’t update itself and Ted pointed me to doing a make -f client.mk configure which regenerated the Makefiles and cleared that up
* I had to look into how to get the environment variable in python – thanks to web search I found the os.environ.get() function

Other than that, it’s all working and I’m very happy to be awaiting another review.

Today as I was setting up a mysql GUI I saw this:

It made me very happy to see that part about Ejecting and ridding yourself of the installer because a lot of folks still might not know that. I’ve definitely met some people who drag firefox to their dock from the installer instead of copying it to their Applications folder. Every time they open the application from the dock, the installer has to mount and someday down the line they might delete it and then not know why the application no longer launches from the dock. OS X just gives the ever so helpful “?” and the user is left to wonder what happened. That far down the line – it’s not so apparent that they should have dragged to the Application folder and ejected the installer.

Most Mac installers these days do make it quite clear that you should drag to your install folder and I would love to see them add this tip too – just to help folks finish what they start.

This is mostly a reminder for me, but if anyone is interested in seeing how the Source Server is working/coming along, my demos are scheduled for:

• Thursday March 13th at 1:30pm in ORI
• Thursday April 3rd at 1:30pm in ORI

The first demo should involve the symbolstore.py patch having been committed, there should be a debug build that can be downloaded and attached to VStudio and/or WinDBG where the source code is then pulled via the Source Server.

The second demo will hopefully be a look at a reverse engineered pdbstr.exe – something that can read and write to pdb files the source indexing data block.