[Libreoffice] GSoC: Easy Hack: Make python / mail-merge debuggable

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Timo,

	First - I'm sorry that your 'easy hack' turned out not to be that
easy :-) [ that sucks ], possibly it is worth doing a hyper-easy one
instead first, you know - finding some pointless comments or whatever.

On Sun, 2011-04-10 at 21:58 +0200, Timo wrote:
> I´ve been working on a uno-messagebox for hours. Office just doesnt
> output anything and starts to sleep when I execute the mailmerge.

	Sorry about that; are you sure that your code is getting executed ? do
you have a patch we can read / discuss ? [ just whack a raw git diff in
a mail to the list so we can poke ].

>  Also there were errors like „XSCRIPTCONTEXT is not defined“. And
> com.sun.star.awt.MessageBoxButtons as well as
> com.sun.star.awt.VclWindowPeerAttribute do not exist but are used in
> examples. These are bugs!

	Sounds like it. Quite possibly there is some hideous new bug with the
python run-time, it is not used enough to be well tested, and we have no
unit tests / smoke-tests for it; I guess that needs fixing (on my TODO
for some months).

> I need an adequate environment to test the script. Always restarting the
> office gui is NOT adequate. Otherwise declare python-tk as a dependency
> in the libreoffice-mailmerge package and the problem is solved.

	Sure - the problem is, that it is not just python-tk it is all of 'tk'
as well, and also compiling, bundling and shipping all of that on every
platform - in addition to our existing visual toolkit ;-) So - I feel
your pain - I know that the UNO toolkit code is nastier than you can
believe, harder than pulling teeth, and tough to debug - but ... can you
persist a little longer ? [ incidentally, perhaps now you see the
debugging problems, you can see why having more usable user-debugging
support for the mail-merge is going to be really useful ].

	So - in a nutshell: don't give up ! :-) send the list the code of where
you are at, and don't worry - prolly it is not your bug. And thanks of
course for struggling with it.

	ATB,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks at novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot