debugging a CEF browser instance

[Mark Waddingham]

On 2017-07-06 08:39, Jonathan Lynch via use-livecode wrote:
> Why?

In general there is a cost to logging - particularly CEF's which is very 
verbose. On Windows you might not notice (as stdout/stderr output is 
generally dumped to the equivalent of /dev/null), but on Linux if you 
happen to be working from the command-line and running UI stuff using 
the browser widget from there then you'll find your terminal flooded 
with CEF logging (and I mean flooded!).

I don't think anyone has asked specifically about having it configurable 
before now - although I noticed it would be useful last month 
(http://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=19862) whilst attempting to 
figure out why the browser widget only works on *some* linux installs 
(seems to be somewhat independent of distribution - the workarounds some 
people have found with regards the locale don't seem to work anymore).

Unfortunately, we aren't any closer to solving the linux problem... 
After at least three of us spending more hours than I'd care to comment 
on trying to figure out what is happening there, we're working through a 
couple of tasks so that we can more easily update CEF to the latest 
version.

In particular, making it so that we can build our 'prebuilts' (currently 
ICU, OpenSSL and Curl) on vulcan (doing it manually is arduous and 
intensely error prone). We can then move the building of the CEF library 
component to a prebuilt and automate its generation based on a version 
tag (we can thank Spotify for taking over the management of binary 
releases of CEF - http://opensource.spotify.com/cefbuilds/index.html - 
as they've made it much much easier).

So we're currently involved in a (small) yak-shave in this regard... 
Although one which will also mean we can solve a couple of other issues 
- the size of ICU data (has anyone noticed that the 9 engines are 
somewhat bigger than 8? That's down in good part to the ICU data), and 
also the several minute increase per platform in build time due to the 
Skia update. I also hope that this means that over time we can eliminate 
the thirdparty submodule entirely - which would be one less point of 
friction in our source base.

Incidentally, Bernard and Jonathon - I take it you are using the browser 
widget on Windows? (The reason I ask that is because CEF is only used on 
Windows and Linux - Mac/Android and iOS all use the built-in browser - 
all three are WebKit derived, like CEF).

Warmest Regards,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps