Description Robert (Kraythe) Simmons 2004-09-22 06:58:51 EDT

I am currently overhauling the old SLeak plugin (Bug: 71615) to eclipse and 
the problem I have is one of usability. Right now you need to do no less than 
three things to enable the plugin to function. All these things are required 
to do and then undo in order to turn device tracing on and off. 

1) Change the .options file in the org.eclipse.ui so that the following are 
set to true:

# Turn on debugging for the org.eclipse.ui plugin.
org.eclipse.ui/debug=true

# Enable the trace of SWT graphics.
org.eclipse.ui/trace/graphics=true

2) Run the platform with the -debug flag on the command line. 

This seems like a royal pain when you are talkign about enabling just do do 
some resource cleanup (hence the reason SLeak shows dangling resources all 
over the IDE.) 

I have found where the display is created on the command line in 
org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench and the lines that enable devide data 
tracking are pasted here: 

		// create the display
		Display newDisplay = null;
		if (Policy.DEBUG_SWT_GRAPHICS) {
			DeviceData data = new DeviceData();
			data.tracking = true;
			newDisplay = new Display(data);
		} else {
			newDisplay = new Display();
		}


I propose that this be changed to simply take either a command line property 
or a system property. So I could say -Dswt.track.device.data=true on the VM 
arguments or -devicedata as a switch to the platform. 

If this was made easier than I think more developers would use SLeak to track 
their resources. Especially with all the improvements i have made. ;-)

There are also 2 locations that have Displays created without any posiblity of 
device data tracking; these should be fixed as well: 

1) org.eclipse.ui.internal.gestures.GestureSupport.main(String[])

This one Can merely be made to support the new flag. 

2) org.eclipse.swt.widgets.getDefault()

Im not sure what to do about this one.