debug an External with XCode on OS X

[Alex Rice]

1) Copy Revolution.app and supporting files and folders into the build 
folder of your XCode project. The layout will look like:

/external.pbproj
/build/External.bundle
/build/Revolution.app
/build/components
/build/plugins
/build/etc
/etc

The reason for this layout so Revolution.app can locate External.bundle 
*and* the Xcode working directory, build/, happens to be a folder where 
Revolution can find it's license file.

2) Open your external.pbproj file in XCode.

3) Make *absolutely sure* that your target's debugging symbols are ON 
and optimizations are OFF. This tripped me up badly because the 
settings look different depending if your target is a legacy bundle or 
a xcode carbon bundle. Also XCode has a bazillion places to set 
compiler linker settings. To be sure, do Project menu | Edit Active 
Target and make the settings there. If you do something else like Get 
Info on your Project styles- you are setting something else- who knows 
what :-/

4) Add Revolution.app into your project. Project menu | New Custom 
Executable. Select Revolution.app (make sure to select the one you 
copied in your build/ folder)

5) clean & build your external (to get the debug build)

6) Set some breakpoints in external.c or other source files

7) Choose Debug menu | Debug executable. Revolution will launch and 
then in Revolution you open a Rev stack that loads the external.bundle. 
The external.bundle used will be the one the build directory. The Xcode 
debugger already has that bundle loaded and the XCode debugger should 
be hitting your breakpoints now!

Hopefully having a real debugger should make writing xternals *much* 
more enjoyable. :-)

Alex Rice <alex at mindlube.com> | Mindlube Software | 
<http://mindlube.com>

what a waste of thumbs that are opposable
to make machines that are disposable  -Ani DiFranco