On Monday I got a very exciting pull request on rbspy which implements a feature that I’ve wanted to implement for years – identifying C functions!

Previously if there was a C function in the stack, rbspy would just call it <c function> - unknown. But it turns out that there’s actually support in Ruby’s .gdbinit for finding the name of these C functions, and this new PR ports that into rbspy!!

I still haven’t totally understood how the PR works, but I spent a bunch of time with Tim and Mikkel yesterday trying to understand it and it was really fun. I might write about this more later after I’ve understood what it’s doing better.

debugging CI is frustrating

While trying to merge some other rbspy PRs I ran into this chain of events:

• merge pull request
• realize that the Travis builds are getting slower at building the releases
• think “maybe I’ll implement GitHub actions, how hard can it be?”
• spent a billion years trying to debug various things in GitHub actions
• get very sad

This was just exactly the same as every other time I’ve tried to set up CI – it’s fine, but it’s always kind of frustrating.

But when I woke up this morning and opened Twitter I saw a tweet from someone who was also having a sad GitHub Actions day, and someone in their replies suggested this debugging with tmate action to let you ssh in! So I’m going to try that and maybe that will make everything a lot easier.