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Commit f1ddfa6d authored by Dave Lee's avatar Dave Lee
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[lldb] Remove pydoc import during script interpreter init

The Python script interpreter imports `pydoc` during initialization, but this can be
slow in some cases, and doesn't seem to be necessary any more.

This can be slow because pydoc may execute shell commands (for example `xcrun` on
macOS). The shell commands may have variable performance, depending on their caches and
search space.

The 2012 bug report for the original commit (f71a8399)
says the following:

> "script help" in lldb pipes the help documentation through less(1) but there's some
> problem with the key handling and often the keys you'd use to move in less (space to
> move down a page, 'q' to quit) are not received by less (they're going to lldb
> instead)

This was resolved at the time by overriding `pydoc`'s pager to be the `plainpager`
function.

I have manually tested `script help(lldb.SBDebugger)` and found no issues with the
pager, including using "space" for paging, "/" for searching, and "q" for quitting.

The presumption is that lldb and/or Python have improved I/O handling that eliminates
the original problem.

The original bug report gave an ~/.lldbinit workaround:

```
script import pydoc; pydoc.pager = pydoc.plainpager
```

Note that calling Python's `help()` will import `pydoc`, but this will only happen for
users who use `help()` from the `script` command.

Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D144138
parent 7d62bc9c
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