So yesterday, there was a small gettogether on IRC in #venkman to discuss the future of Venkman. Right now the trunk builds are not fully functional anymore, and the last checkins were several months ago. So in fact, it’s in a pretty miserable state.
On to more positive things:
- There is a raw log of the conversation on IRC for those interested.
- WeirdAl and I will be going through the current list of open Venkman bugs today (2007-09-02) starting 12pm PST (noon) – and we need your help! Please drop by in #venkman on IRC if you want to help out doing triage and all that.
- We will try to prioritize the open bugs so we get a reasonably usable trunk build back, and get a new release out ASAP. We can’t currently make promises about how long this will take, as it will depend on how easy it’ll turn out to be to fix some of the current bugs – but we are aiming for a new Venkman release on AMO within about 2 weeks.
- We will try to make a todo list on a wiki somewhere (probably wiki.mozilla.org) to keep track of what will need to be done.
- We will try to get the MozPad folks involved to support Venkman as it is currently one of the only reasonable debugging tools for chrome-level JavaScript (as Firebug doesn’t work there).
All in all, we hope to get Venkman back to usability and happiness very soon, and to keep it there. If you can help out, please do! Drop by in #venkman, leave a comment here, or on WeirdAl’s weblog. Any help is much appreciated!
How have the Firefox developers been working without a debugger?
James: have you heard of Firebug?
/be
Brendan: I bet he has, but last I checked Firebug still doesn’t do chrome debugging.
James: I’ve been using Venkman on trunk when I really need a debugger, but it’s pretty hard to use, so unless I really need it, I resort to the more primitive technique of sprinkling dump statements throughout my code. I suspect other Firefox deveolpers are doing the same thing.
Gijs: I wonder if Firebug could be made to work with XUL with less effort than it would take to make Venkman work with the trunk. If so, it’s worth considering doing that instead.
Gijs, Al, I’m pleased to hear that!
I’m using Venkman a lot, especially for chrome debugging and such in SeaMonkey development, so just count me in (for whatever little time I may have)…