We should think about a way how to make debugging possible

[BjoernLudwigPTB]

Because of the subprocesses we are spawning, in general debugging does not work as usual. We should think about, if it is possible to make that available. It would strip a lot of print statements from the codes we are seeing being written using the agents and make debugging a lot easier.

[bangxiangyong]

yes, i'm wondering how the osbrain guys do it as well..

[BjoernLudwigPTB]

Steps to take then:

• check how osbrain is doing it
• ...

[bangxiangyong]

Apparently the guys at osbrain have not implemented how to attach a debugger yet. The way they handled it is described here: opensistemas-hub/osbrain#360

[BjoernLudwigPTB]

#113 would make this obsolete, right? We should first deal with the considerations regarding the backend change, before we keep thinking about this.

[bangxiangyong]

i figured one way to do it with pycharm is via 'Attach a debugger to Process' via Ctrl+Shift+A
after the agents are launched, we can attach a debugger to individual agent, and i manage to stop at a breakpoint and inspect the sine genrator agent's loop.

however, since the processes have different names , we may not be able to tell which process belongs to which agent. some exploration is needed for a smoother debugging experience..

[BjoernLudwigPTB]

That sounds just like what I imagined. Maybe it would help to record the subprocesses name or id when spawning it.

I originally hoped, that Python built-in pdb would offer this functionality. Several SE threads (e.g. this one) suggest it does not and I could not find anything in its documentation sounding differently. At least if PyCharm and probably other IDEs and debugging tools are able to allow for attaching to a running process, we might want to provide a tutorial how to make use of this.