Solved that bug I was stuck on yesterday. I had been looking in the code for the developer side for a bug, but that side was fine; the bug was excessive backlog trimming on the user side.

Now I'm fairly happy with how debug-me's activity chains look, and the first stage of developing debug-me is complete. It still doesn't do anything more than the script command, but all the groundwork for the actual networked debug-me is done now. I only have to add signing, verification of gpg key trust, and http client-server to finish debug-me.

(Also, I made debug-me --replay debug-me.log replay the log with realistic delays, like scriptreplay or ttyplay. Only took a page of code to add that feature.)


I'm only "fairly happy" with the activity chains because there is a weird edge case.. At high latency, when typing "qwertyuiop", this happens:

debug-me.log.png

That looks weird, and is somewhat hard to follow in graph form, but it's "correct" as far as debug-me's rules for activity chains go. Due to the lag, the chain forks:

  • It sends "wer" before the "q" echos back
  • It replies to the "q" echo with tyuio" before the "w" echos back.
  • It replies to the "w" echo with "p"
  • Finally, all the delayed echos come in, and it sends a carriage return, resulting in the command being run.

I'd be happier if the forked chain explicitly merged back together, but to do that and add any provable information, the developer would have to wait for all the echos to arrive before sending the carriage return, or something like that, which would make type-ahead worse. So I think I'll leave it like this. Most of the time, latency is not so high, and so this kind of forking doesn't happen much or is much simpler to understand when it does happen.