[OpenLayers-Dev] Firebug Lite -> OpenLayers

[Tim Schaub]

Hey-

Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 07, 2007 at 03:44:38PM -0400, Schuyler Erle wrote:
>> Tim Schaub's latest patch for OL fixes the long standing lack of
>> consistent logging tools in OL. However, the solution involves
>> distributing all of Firebug Lite with OL:
>>
>> http://www.getfirebug.com/lite.html
>>
>> http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/507
>>
>> Before I go ahead and approve this patch, does anyone have any
>> objections or concerns to throwing something this big into the mix? You
>> must propose an alternate solution before I will listen seriously to any
>> objections. ;-)

In case it's not clear from all my trac spam, Firebug Lite provides very 
non-obtrusive, optional, debugging functionality.

It will *never* get built into a single file version.  The only 
additional OpenLayers code is in OpenLayers.Console [1].

If someone doesn't have it, nothing happens.  The only time it does 
anything is if the firebug.js script is included before the 
OpenLayers.js in an application.  When this condition is met, any calls 
to OpenLayers.Console.log, .warn, .error, or others will show up in a 
Firebug like console.

> We have to ship the BSD license with the right copyright line in it with
> the code. There's a link to SVN in the readme: grab the license.txt,
> adjust the readme.txt to reference it, and then I'm happy.
> 

Let me know if the change I just made takes care of this [2].

Finally, regarding Erik's comments earlier, for me this isn't about 
whether or not we write bug-free code.  It's about anticipating where 
users (application developers) will go astray.  I think we'd mostly 
agree that OpenLayers' biggest shortcoming is lack of documentation. 
Due to this, we've got a bunch of users who are learning the library by 
experimentation.  I see this as an opportunity to give the kind of 
feedback users deserve when using a new library/framework/whatever.

Tim

[1] 
http://dev.openlayers.org/sandbox/tschaub/debug/lib/OpenLayers/Console.js

[2] http://dev.openlayers.org/sandbox/tschaub/debug/lib/Firebug/readme.txt