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It should be possible to use netbeans as a drop in replacement for any gdb ui. Right now there needs to be a project imported and (more importantly) the debugged binary has to be a product of that project (correct me if I am wrong here). With pure gdb or through a GUI providing a direct gdb terminal (such as ddd), I can attach to any process at any time and start debugging immediately, provided I the source information is embedded in the binary or I point gdb to it. This is difficult in netbeans, as a project has to be assembled first. Also it made it impossible for me to debug native java libraries (even when the library code is a project in netbeans), because netbeans complains that the java binary is not produced by the project (the project produces a shared library, which gets linked in run-time to the java process). At the same time I could attach with gdb separately and start working right away. I find those problems in 6.9.
in 7.0 there are two new project types when attaching: - no project - create new project So you should be able to attach even without a project. You can try that in the latest dev build: http://bits.netbeans.org/download/trunk/nightly/latest/