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 _______________________________________________ dev-b2g mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
