Linux Debugging GTK

Making warnings fatal

See Running GLib Applications for notes on how to make GTK warnings fatal.

Using GTK Debug packages

sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-0-dbg

Make sure that you're building a binary that matches your architecture (e.g. 64-bit on a 64-bit machine), and there you go.

Source

You‘ll likely want to get the source for gtk too so that you can step through it. You can tell gdb that you’ve downloaded the source to your system's GTK by doing:

$ cd /my/dir
$ apt-get source libgtk-3-0
$ gdb ...
(gdb) set substitute-path /build/buildd /my/dir

NOTE: I tried debugging pango in a similar manner, but for some reason gdb didn't pick up the symbols from the symbols from the -dbg package. I ended up building from source and setting my LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

See building_debug_gtk.md for more on how to build your own debug version of GTK.

Parasite

http://chipx86.github.com/gtkparasite/ is great. Go check out the site for more about it.

Install it with

sudo apt-get install gtkparasite

And then run Chrome with

GTK_MODULES=gtkparasite ./out/Debug/chrome

GDK_DEBUG

Use GDK_DEBUG=nograbs to run GTK+ without grabs. This is useful for gdb sessions.