The CHIRP-next has a menu item allowing to show the debug log. It seems to be in a private /tmp location with a name starting “chirp_debug"
When I run “./chirpwx.py” from my development copy of CHIRP (with developer mode turned on) … NOW where can I find the debug log? If I knew its name, I suppose I could run find(1) to get it. If it needs to be named in some parameter so I can access it, what’s the parameter? Does it require a redirect from stderr?
If you're running it from a tty, it just logs directly to the console, so no debug log is created. If you want one, redirect stdin to something other than a tty (so "./chipwxpy </dev/null" or something). But, if you're working on it, you probably want it to just log to the console, or at least, I do.
I have been using developer mode simply to browse the state of my data. That’s pretty useful. I see there’s also an option to “interact with the driver”, which gives me a python “>>>” prompt with an introduction: WARNING: Going to interact with radio at the console Locals are: main, radio
What are interesting things one can do with the driver interaction? Can one set breakpoints? Modify code on-the-fly? Inspect or change program state other than the data seen by the browser? I am just barely aware enough to ask python for "dir(radio)” and for individual items in my driver… what next?
The "radio" object is your driver class's instance, so you can do whatever you want with it. You don't need to use this interface to use pdb (although you probably can, I'm not a debugger guy). I usually use it when I'm trying to figure out something with a driver and I want to run commands directly against the driver, like getting a memory, making some specific change to it (that might be hard to do with the GUI) and then set it back to see the effect.
It's really one of those things where if you have to ask, it's probably not very useful to you :)
--Dan