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Stetho: A new debugging platform for Android

code.facebook.com

21–26 of 26 posts

Re: Stetho: A new debugging platform for Android

#21
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't matter if this was covered or not. Their license is saying that you can use their stuff as long as you don't question any of their patents.

Github would earn a lot of respect if they simply disallowed that sort of license for anything hosted with them.

Downvotes? Really? Github could make a stand here and disallow licenses that evil and self-serving. With this license, anybody who even uses this software can't challenge any patents of Facebook's. If Github said no, this is wrong, they would set an example for everyone else and single this out as the terrible license it is.

Re: Stetho: A new debugging platform for Android

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github would earn a lot of respect if they simply disallowed that sort of license for anything hosted with them.

Downvotes? Really? Github could make a stand here and disallow licenses that evil and self-serving. With this license, anybody who even uses this software can't challenge any patents of Facebook's. If Github said no, this is wrong, they would set an example for everyone else and single this out as the terrible license it is.

Downvotes because its rather impractical, and Im sure many people don't want GitHub to start arbitrarily banning projects because of a random set of beliefs they have.

And then you have people that pay money to GitHub for code hosting...

Re: Stetho: A new debugging platform for Android

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvotes? Really? Github could make a stand here and disallow licenses that evil and self-serving. With this license, anybody who even uses this software can't challenge any patents of Facebook's. If Github said no, this is wrong, they would set an example for everyone else and single this out as the terrible license it is.

Downvotes because its rather impractical, and Im sure many people don't want GitHub to start arbitrarily banning projects because of a random set of beliefs they have. And then you have people that pay money to GitHub for code hosting...

But Github here is in the position where they are the only external party that could do something about this, because the code is hosted on their site.

> ... Im sure many people don't want GitHub to start arbitrarily banning projects because of a random set of beliefs they have

It wouldn't be unprecedented and it wouldn't be arbitrary. Google Code, for instance, only allows open source projects to be hosted with them. From what I can tell about Github, they allow any license. Doesn't mean that they can't change that policy.

Sure, it's easier to do nothing. But they alone could do something. And Facebook will get the goodwill they want from this without much kickback because nobody does anything.

Re: Stetho: A new debugging platform for Android

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just an honest question: What's the benefit of using this over the adb bridge and debug bridge to debug code on-the-fly?

The biggest difference is you dont need to add debug code deploy, you just connect. For things like the network traffic it is really hard to see request/response for a particular thing. For the dumpers - those are basically a main method inside your program that you can run whenever. Its a nice way to change (or dump) state of the program, similar to adb shell dumpsys, but also allows a richer interface for changing…

That's a great explanation. Thank you. Doesn't it cause problems not being able to pause the execution of the programme?

Re: Stetho: A new debugging platform for Android

#26
post #24

Looks cool! But wait: does it mean that we have to add this instrumentation code when debugging, but when releasing to the Play Store, we have to remember to remove it? Or does it work only when the app is not signed and you can attach the debugger?

Currently our recommendation is to use an if (DEBUG) block around your initialization and then use proguard to remove the dead code in release. We are working on a better solution which allows you to use build flavors in gradle. The proguard solution is how Facebook apps strip it out today, however.

That said, it is safe to ship the stetho engine in your release apps and it adds virtually no runtime overhead to initialize due to our deferred init design. For instance, Chrome for Android ships with the same system we have and it is always enabled even for release builds.

See https://github.com/facebook/stetho/issues/16 to track our progress addressing this issue.

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