Description

ktowen

opened on Oct 7, 2025

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Feature or enhancement

Proposal:

Add two new commands to the Python debugger (pdb) to ignore and unignore specific modules when navigating frames.
Those commands allows to use wildcards to ignore submodules too.

• ignore_module [module_name] - Add modules to skip during debugging
• unignore_module [module_name] - Remove modules from the skip list

When debugging applications we often need to step through deep stack traces from third party libraries that are hard to navigate and makes focusing on our code harder, requiring to manually go up or down to find our code.

There is a similar implementation on ipython ipython/ipython#14973

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

This is a minor feature, which does not need previous discussion elsewhere

Links to previous discussion of this feature:

No response

Linked PRs

• gh-139721: Add ignore_module/unignore_module commands to pdb #139724

Activity

1. ktowen

   added

   type-featureA feature request or enhancementA feature request or enhancement

   on Oct 7, 2025
2. StanFromIreland

   added

   stdlibStandard Library Python modules in the Lib/ directoryStandard Library Python modules in the Lib/ directory

   on Oct 7, 2025
3. ktowen

   added 5 commits that reference this issue on Oct 7, 2025

   pythongh-139721: Add ignore_module/unignore_module commands to pdb

   f607f22

   pythongh-139721: Add ignore_module/unignore_module commands to pdb

   401e1e3

   pythongh-139721: Add ignore_module/unignore_module commands to pdb

   ac97b3b

   pythongh-139721: Fix pdbcommand regex to support underscores

   96f6941

   pythongh-139721: Add skip message to stop_here for ignored modules

   e3d97d0
4. gaogaotiantian commented on Oct 9, 2025

   

   gaogaotiantian

   on Oct 9, 2025

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   Okay so I'm always a bit hesitated when we try to add extra commands to pdb because we can't revert it. I'm not saying we should never do that, just want to make sure it's something that a reasonable amount of users need.

   To be honest, I don't like the skip argument of Pdb - it makes things complicated. Any "exceptional rules" will face the problem of conflict rules. For example, we just fixed an issue when an explicit inline breakpoint is in a "skipped" module (#130493). What would be the expected behavior? Who gets higher priority?

   gcc has a similar command skip (and if we are to add this, we should name it skip too). lldb does not have anything like this as far as I know.

   I also disagree that up and down should be impacted by this. skipping a boring module in control is different than not able to inspect it.

   BTW if I read your implementation correctly, it will fill the user's terminal with warnings when it enters a skipped module. You are printing something in stop_here.

   So here's my suggestion - write a post in d.p.o. and see if the community is interested in such a feature. At least get a few supporters before we make this in pdb permanently.

   If we are to add this, keep the consistency as much as possible. We should have the same behavior as the skip argument. Have a single command skip to control everything. Do not mess with the inspection commands.

   Reacted by ktowen

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