Re: Venkman planning for Gecko 1.9

Gijs Kruitbosch wrote:
> On the other hand, it has perhaps about 30% of the JS debugging features 
> Venkman has (

> profiling? 
Implemented

> freezing js execution in other windows? 
I guess you mean breakpoints? Implemented.  Other windows is part of the 
extension support (Chromebug) I am working on this.

> ignoring files while debugging? 
? I don't know what this means.

> setting evaluation objects? 
Watch is implemented
pretty print?
I use it for browser-generated event handlers, but general use of pretty 
print is not implemented.

>), and 
> the code is generally speaking harder to hack than Venkman (at least, 
> several people seem to believe this). 
True, but Venkman is not a cake walk either.

> From a security perspective, some 
> of Firebug's features (notably console logging etc.) are also a bit 
> problematic at the moment (see version history for 1.02 and 1.03 on 
> addons.mozilla.org).
The current release is 1.05 and 1.1 is almost in beta.

On the other hand, Venkman does not support eval() debugging, 
browser-generated event handlers, CSS errors, CSS state, HTML state, 
break-on-top-level, net traffic analysis or FF3.

But I don't think the feature list is so important since they can be 
made similar. Both programs are frankly mysterious because they rely on 
poorly documented underlying APIs.  In fact Venkman is in my experience 
the best documentation we have for JSD. In a perfect world I'd like to 
see both up to speed. But in reality we have only a few people who can 
work on these, so I want to be sure you know about Chromebug so you can 
consider that alternative.

> 
> ~ Gijs
> 
> John J. Barton wrote:
>> Any interest in an alternative: extending Firebug to XUL? I have made 
>> some progress in adapting Firebug to debug Firefox extensions and to 
>> have it run on FF3. Most of the needed changes for extensions will 
>> also apply to XUL apps; the only major difference is the start-up logic.
>>
>> At this point there might be more Firebug expertise than Venkman 
>> expertise and considerably more users; rather than bitrotted, Firebug 
>> is arguably better positioned to deal with new issues like css and 
>> dynamic code.
>>
>> John.
>>
>>
>> Alex Vincent wrote:
>>> Over the last couple years, the Mozilla code base has evolved 
>>> significantly on the trunk. Unfortunately, development on the 
>>> JavaScript Debugger has not kept pace - the code has "bitrotted" 
>>> significantly, and introduced significant bugs.
>>>
>>> This is a serious problem. It's equally serious that no one is 
>>> hacking on it. I've found it to be a very useful tool for working on 
>>> chrome code, and XULRunner apps would benefit from having a debugger 
>>> handy.
>>>
>>> So here's what I want to do. I want to schedule a weekend meeting for 
>>> 2 pm PDT Saturday [1] at #venkman on moznet [2]. The goal, as I see 
>>> it, is to plan fixing Venkman so it is usable on the XULRunner 1.9 
>>> platform. (Getting it working on Firefox 3 would be a nice thing, 
>>> too.) I want to see who's willing to contribute hours (weeks, more 
>>> likely) of coding and/or reviewing to this goal. In particular, I'm 
>>> worried about trying to find out whatever API changes are needed in 
>>> Venkman itself (not what API Venkman has to call) and getting them in 
>>> before 1.9 branches.
>>>
>>> Watch my weblog [3] for more details; I'll write up a draft plan for 
>>> the meeting, so we have some things to think about.
>>>
>>> [1] 
>>> http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?year=2007&month=9&day=1&hour=22&min=0&sec=0 
>>>
>>> [2] irc://irc.mozilla.org/#venkman
>>> [3] http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/weirdal/
>>>
>>> Alex Vincent