Venkman

Introduction

Venkman is Mozilla's cross platform JavaScript Debugger, visit devmo for a comprehensive overview. Alas, it's currently in a sad state of hibernation - its homepage is out of sync with reality since 2005! The current version on amo is 0.9.87.4, though.

Despite efforts for a web-related debugger for Firefox (named Firebug), Venkman still has its place as a cross-platform, cross-application (Firefox, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, Netscape, etc.) debugging tool for both web and Mozilla chrome development.

Unfortunately, Venkman's codebase hasn't kept pace with current development of the Mozilla ecosystem, so action is badly required to keep Venkman alive. This page aims at helping in coordinating this.

Tasks

The stuff to be done can be splitted in three major groups:
Todo: add more bug numbers!

Architecture

General changes needed to make Venkman work with current development, to ease maintenance and attracting developers.

• Venkman should adhere to the common Mozilla build system (Makefile.in, jar.mn, install.rdf, etc.).
• Venkman should reside in its own hg repository (currently, it still lives in the to-be-abandoned CVS trunk aka as Gecko 1.9.0.x).

These two points should probably be done in close relation: do the move into Hg, then renew build structure there. CVS version numbers could continue 0.9.xx and keep backwards compatibility, while Hg version could become 0.10.yy and may break compatibility with pre-1.9 code.

The meta bug 141097 ("Release Venkman 1.0") is still valid, but needs to be changed to reflect this new reality.

Important Bugs

Bugs which break Venkman or make it hard to use.

• bug 342590 – Make --enable-extensions=venkman work for XULRunner
• bug 424493 - Copying native code stack frames generates errors
• bug 446120 - Watches crash when expanding 2 levels and the values change
• bug 449766 - Variable Value remains "undefined" when stopped in a debugger before initialization of the variable (JSD bug, seen in both Vnk and Firebug).
• bug 452288 - Allow ignoring NS_ERROR_NO_INTERFACE errors
• Venkman doesn't recognise let statements
• ...

Enhancements

• Better keyboard experience, eg. shortcut keys for (un)setting breakpoints, etc. pp.
• Source code tooltips with variable values.
• ...

Related Links

• Alex Vincent started a thread about Venkman's future with focus on Gecko 1.9 in the Mozilla newsgroup mozilla.dev.apps.js-debugger in 2007, but it didn't really take off.
• Alex Vincent made a fresh attempt with his blog post on Gecko 1.9.1, TraceMonkey and Venkman? recently.

Page maintained by Karsten Düsterloh.