274742 - Undefined/unusable application state

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Other Applications Graveyard :: Venkman JS Debugger, defect)

Description

[Robert Brown III]

1. Start Venkman without previously opening a page in Firefox by invoking:

firefox.exe -venkman (on Windows)
or
firefox -venkman (under Linux)

I see see a number of (I think) venkman- related js files loaded. Unfortunately,
it is unclear what state Venkman is in; the
debugger commands are all disabled (except Stop, which apparently does nothing),
there is no way to load other js files or debugging, and attempts to "open" such
files appear to be ignored by the application. In short, Venkman does nothing,
debugs nothing, and appears to be quite useless.

Based on this and other problems (documented in seperate bug reports), this
"tool" of yours appears to be completely useless and unusable -- at least with
your Firefox browser. Your documentation is inadequate, the software does not
appear to work properly, and its failure handling is among the worst I've seen
in any software. I would be interested in knowing exactly what plans you have
(if any) to eventually fix these inadequacies.

Comment 1

[James Ross]

The menu/button state is correct. There is nothing to debug, you're not
'stopped', so why sould you be able to Start or Step?

Clicking Stop /does/ do something. It changes the icon on the Stop toolbar to
include a '...' (I know it subtle and, for you, I don't care). This puts it into
the "waiting for code" state, where by it will imediately break into the debug
when some JS code is run. See, for example,
http://www.hacksrus.com/~ginda/venkman/faq/venkman-faq.html#2.6 which documents
this clearly.