Through out my experience with python debugger, I often found myself creating if-statements around set_trace() instructions. This patch introduces a key-word argument that allows to pass in a boolean or a condition that evaluates to boolean to control whether pdb.set_trace() command needs to be executed.

Does this flag make things much easier? You would still need an if statement in order to correctly pass in True/False for the trigger flag.

Perhaps it's a matter of preference. I found it convenient, since passing in a boolean expression allows me to get rid of extra if-blocks thus reducing lines of code and increasing debugging speed. I wanted to share my idea with the community - but please feel free to close the issue if you find it trivial.

############## SAMPLE USE CASE ##############
import pdb

def square(i):
	pdb.set_trace(trigger=not isinstance(i, (float, int)))
	print(i**2)

# debug: hunting for TypeError
a = 2
square(a) # will not execute set_trace()
b = None
square(b) # will execute set_trace()

You could just do

breakpoint() if trigger else None

Concise, easy, and avoids complicating set_trace().

Or even more concise:

trigger and breakpoint()

I was actually leaning in favor of this, but Jason's examples are very compelling and require no changes to other `breakpoint()`-compatible debuggers to work as expected.

Thanks for the idea, though!