Debugging the IDE

[Bob Sneidar]

Hi all. 

I'm going to throw this out there, and see if I get a bite. I have been spending a good part of the day trying to debug a plugin, I won't say which. To do this I set the global gRevDevelopment to true so I can step through the scripts. To my horror I am finding a number of errors where a handler is being called that didn't exist, but it never shows up because if gRevDevelopment is false, plugins silently fail. 

It has now occured to me that some plugin developers may actually depend on this. That is, if they want to update a window but aren't sure there will even be an open window, they code like there will be and if there isn't the code silently fails. No harm, no blood, no foul. 

Does this seem like this might be the case? Because if it is, then I cannot imagine how to debug someone elses plugin that depends on this. Or am I just finding bugs that the developer just never knew about? 

I came across one instance where a line of code set a property in the plugin stack, but the way it was written it could never have succeeded. I checked to see if the property existed, and indeed it did not! But the prior line set another property and that property DID exist. 

Gives one pause...

Bob S