Well I ended up modifying build.xml as per your suggestion. I added

<!-- Enable debugger on port 5005 -->
<jvmarg value="-agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=y,address=5005" />

to the list of <jvmarg>'s in the test.ansi.compiled target. As for setting a breakpoint in the source automatically - what do you mean by automatically? I used IntelliJ IDEA to add them manually because I was interested in debugging Java code.

Now I get 33 failures, just like ABCL from SVN HEAD. Yay! :) Now on with the article...

On 4 February 2016 at 13:59, Mark Evenson <evenson@panix.com> wrote:
On 2/4/16 09:30, Alessio Stalla wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> in my local copy of ABCL I broke some ANSI tests related to packages and
> that's not good. I'm lazy so I'm asking here: does someone have a ready
> recipe to debug the ANSI tests, in particular to place breakpoints inside
> ABCL's Java code while it is executing the tests? In the minute or so I
> spent thinking about it before getting lazy, I couldn't figure out how to
> pass the jdwp incantation to the JVM launched by Ant when testing.


As for setting a breakpoint in the source automatically, I think that
would be trés cool, but have no practical suggestions.  I would be very
interested in sketching up an abstraction for this to start figuring out
how do this.

As for invoking JVM with JDWP messages, I am not exactly sure either,
but the [`abcl.build.debug.jpda` ant target][1] shows how to do the
simpler task of forking a JVM configured to communicate to a JPDA client
which I think is the first step in getting to JDWP.

[1]:  http://abcl.org/trac/browser/trunk/abcl/build.xml#L590

Interested in hearing further progress from your side.


--
"A screaming comes across the sky.  It has happened before, but there
is nothing to compare to it now."