Just a few thought about that topic.

I regularly talk with people from Adobe and Opera and I'm still surprise
that their is not a concerting effort to produce a standard debugging
protocol for JavaScript and browsers (or things like FIrefoxOS or
ChromeOS). My concern as a Web Developer is that I will have to use several
different incompatible tools to remote debug a single Web App in several
environment. This fragmentation is a risk for a niche product such as
Firefox OS which need a strong basis of developers to build apps that make
the product appealing.

Is their some people working on such a debug protocole at Mozilla? Does
Mozilla has plan to work with other browser vendors on that topic (At W3C
or else where)?

Thanks
++
Jérémie


2013/1/12 Panos Astithas <[email protected]>

> On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 4:31 AM, Fabrice Desre <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> >
> > On 01/11/2013 06:09 PM, David Bruant wrote:
> >
> > > I've discovered on the devengage mailing list [1] that as of January
> > > 10th, remote debugging for FirefoxOS has been disabled. This is quite
> > > unfortunate, because remote debugging makes a tremendous difference in
> > > my work studying and documenting the APIs. It's also obviously a much
> > > needed feature for app developers.
> > > A couple of questions remain unanswered:
> > > * Why has this been decided?
> >
> > The remote debugging support we have currently on b2g only allow
> > debugging the chrome process. This was a huge security issue since this
> > process runs as root on device. Unfortunately the work needed to debug
> > content processes is not finished yet (there are bugs filed, but I don't
> > know the numbers).
>
> Bug 797627 tracks this work and Jim is working on it. I'll probably also
> pitch in to help with debugger frontend changes, after the protocol bits
> are in place.
>
> > > * Is it planned to re-enable it in its previous form? a new form?
> >
> > As soon as the devtools team get content processes debugging working,
> > we'll happily enable that support. Note that we didn't disable support
> > on b2g desktop, where out of process is disabled, so devs can debug
> there.
> >
> > > * Has a date or milestone been decided to fix this issue?
> >
> > I don't know. Panagiotis may tell us more!
>
> Since we re-enabled debugging support for desktop b2g builds yesterday (bug
> 784824, bug 829633 - still needs a+ for b2g18), I believe the urgency of
> the matter has subsided somewhat. We can at least proceed with the Firefox
> OS App Days schedule as planned, which was my immediate concern.
>
> I'm also trying to figure out ways to enable debugging for non-production
> builds, but Fabrice tells me it's not that easy to do this in gecko land.
> Any help here is more than welcome!
>
> Supporting subprocesses is non-trivial work, as it needs significant
> modifications to the protocol specification, as well as the implementation
> of client (frontend) and server. I can't speak for Jim on that, but at the
> same time I'm trying a few ideas right now to see if we can have a secure,
> albeit limited, debugging functionality for production devices. I'll
> probably add any new patches in bug 817580, since I intend to tweak what we
> have there a bit.
>
> > > * If it takes too long to fix, what are the other ways to debug apps on
> > > an actual device?
> >
> > None that I know of.
>
> Neither do I.
>
> > > Besides these questions to understand the current situation, I'd like
> to
> > > discuss a trend I'm noticing. I am under the impression that app
> > > developers are becoming a growing population of the FirefoxOS ecosystem
> > > especially with Mozilla increasingly reaching out to potential such
> > > developers (app days all over the globe in the upcoming weeks). I feel
> > > it will become increasingly important for this population to have a
> > > stable development environment and if for good reasons the environment
> > > can't be kept stable, alert this population of the upcoming change that
> > > may affect it.
> >
> > I agree. But we have tight schedules so we can't usually give notice too
> > much in advance. For this particular topic, we discussed the problem and
> > solutions on Monday, and got code landed Wednesday. Being in a frantic
> > work week, we didn't make a great job reaching out to developers. We'll
> > do our best to better communicate such changes in the future.
>
>
> I'll just add that the thought of me presenting on our local App Day only
> to say "sorry but there is no way to debug your apps" was pretty
> terrifying, so rest assured we all share your concerns.
>
> Panos
> _______________________________________________
> engagement-developers mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/engagement-developers
>



-- 
Jeremie
.............................
Web : http://jeremie.patonnier.net
Twitter : @JeremiePat <http://twitter.com/JeremiePat>
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