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Friday, April 11, 2008

Dumb Debugger Trick Followup

From the comments on Dumb Debugger Trick, I was prompted to try the Plug-in Spy in Eclipse 3.3.1 which is where I work on Jazz. I was skeptical: new features are generally not coded with backwards compatibility in mind and are coded to take advantage of the latest and greatest from other plug-ins.

Unfortunately it is a no go to just drop in the org.eclipse.pde.runtime plug-in into 3.3.1. Too much has changed:
  • the LogView implementation has moved, so you lose the Error Log.
  • RegistryBrowserLabelProvider uses new 3.4 methods on org.eclipse.osgi.service.resolver.State...though I was surprised the method was not tagged with a @since ??
The Plug-in Spy itself works but there are too many other negatives to make this a workable tweak in my opinion.

So my simple debugging gem will remain in my bag of tricks to help quickly diagnose a bug or evaluate to emulate a part of Eclipse where a solution is presented for a problem/flow similar to mine.

But if you are using and working on top of 3.4, get to know Alt-Shift-F1.

P.S. I have filed an enhancement (bug 226590) for the plug-in spy (patch attached for those busy PDE dudes)...I look forward to spying on those content outline pages in M7 ;-)

6 comments:

Jesper said...

There's an Eclipse 3.3 compatible version available in bug 210162.

Works perfectly with 3.3.x.

Chris Aniszczyk (zx) said...

It wasn't tagged since it's not API ;p

Forgive me Darin :)

It seems that the best option in the future will be to refactor the Plug-in Spy outside of pde runtime. There's been too much demand for it.

Chris Aniszczyk (zx) said...

Oh, I guess to save my arse, I can say that it's all part of my secret plan to get people to move to 3.4 quicker :P

Newbie said...

You can also checkout the plugin spy from CVS from date just before it was refactored into pde runtime.

Repository path: /cvsroot/eclipse
Module: pde-incubator/spy/plugins/org.eclipse.pde.ui.spy
Tag: 09 Dec 2007 21:00:00 +0000 (Date)

Max said...

Get the original PDE plugin spy here http://www.eclipse.org/pde/incubator/spy/ or use this update site: http://www.mea-culpa.net/pdespy/

works great ;)

Darin Swanson said...

Thanks guys...just what I need...something else to try this weekend :-)