[Product-Developers] Re: Where does it hurt?

[Daniel Nouri]

David Glick writes:

> On May 18, 2008, at 5:56 PM, Dylan Jay wrote:
>
>> Martin Aspeli wrote:
>>> Hi guys,
>>> Following a long discussion with Dylan Jay (buried in another
>>> thread on Devilstick terminology), I thought I'd conduct an
>>> informal poll.
>>> ==> As a customiser of Plone, or as someone wanting to build
>>> bespoke components that extend Plone, what do you find most
>>> confusing?
>>> I think this could fall into a few categories:
>>> - Areas where there's insufficient/poor documentation, but once you
>>> learn how to do something, it's clear how to proceed.
>>> - Areas where there appears to be more than one approach, and it's
>>> not clear which one to choose
>>> - Areas where Plone doesn't appear to have a good way to do something
>>
>> I think it hurts the most when something goes wrong. I write
>> something that I think should work, it doesn't, suddenly I'm faced
>> with understand everything I'm relying on.
>> Debugging is a nightmare. Perhaps I'm not using the right tools. but
>> generally I try to read the code, which with the amount of
>> indirection these days is pretty hard to read. The fact thats its
>> not obvious where the definition the code I'm after is makes it
>> harder. For instance I was trying to find the schema definitions fot
>> ATCT the other day... and thats just z2. Trying to work out how to
>> the standard templates got connected in in plone.z3cform was even
>> harder.
>> I'm not 100% sure how to fix this. A tutorial on how to read code?
>> The slow startup time makes this worse of course because one way to
>> try and fix things is to try different stuff and see what happens.
>
> FWIW, here are some cases from my experience that have seemed
> particularly hard to debug.  (Not trying to whinge here; just trying
> to catalog some possible areas for improvement)...
> - Python scripts, since you can't see where you're at in pdb and it's
> hard to avoid stepping through z2 security stuff.  (Why do we still
> have these in the age of utilities and browser views, anyway?)

See http://www.zope.org/Members/regebro/ScriptDebugging


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