Has anything changed in debug log?

[Terisa de morgan]

Hello,

I've got calibre 8.4 installed on Windows 10. Till now, the debug log was inside a temporal folder I've defined and it containes information.
Now, it is stored in
C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\calibre-cache\calibre-debug-log.txt and it is empty ALL the times. As I haven't changed anything in my configuration (that I'm aware....), can you please tell me what do I have to do to solve it?

NOTE: It looks like calibre has been modified to write always the same file. This is fine if you finish calibre and get the log. The issue is when you restart calibre to get the log and continue working. It looks like it's overwritten in restart, so you have to stop, check the log, restart and restart again in debug mode (or start always in debug mode from command line).

[Comfy.n]

The way I use the debug log is like this:

- click Restart in debug mode
- see the output
- click Restart (the blue button, from then on)

In previous debug logs display behaviour, to which I got used, this resulted often in several notepad (notepad3 in my case) files in taskbar - like tmp56yhhh.txt, tmp82883jjj.txt, and so on. I wouldn't close them immediately after checking, so I often ended up with the taskbar full of log files, as I don't combine tasks in taskbar. One solution for this would be a batch script to terminate all notepad3 processes, however I have often times other unsaved notes open, then...this not suitable.

Current behaviour to which I'm trying to get used: initially the notepad3 calibre-debug-log.txt file opens empty and i get the following prompt after the first restart:



What I do is click "Monitor" and this works fine because there's only one item in taskbar during all restarts. But in a previous 8.x version, can't pinpoint which, something wasn't working correctly; I believe this has been fixed by https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibr...727d47ffd7d1fa.

I'd need to click Monitor all the time across restarts - not just once upon initial restart. Today on quick tests I notice it's needed to click Monitor only once and that's great news, but I sometimes would like to see the overwritten logs like before - one for each restart.

[kovidgoyal]

Nowadays calibre guarantees to delete all its tempfiles even if it crashes or is killed with SIGKILL. That means it cant use temp files for debug logs anymore.
So you get a fixed, single debug log file.

[Comfy.n]

thanks Kovid

[Terisa de morgan]

Thank you for the explanation. As I say, the only issue is the empty file if you restart in debug mode but I can work around that.

[thiago.eec]

I prefer to open calibre as 'calibre-debug -g' from the terminal. This way I can restart many times while debugging.

[Comfy.n]

Originally Posted by thiago.eec

I prefer to open calibre as 'calibre-debug -g' from the terminal. This way I can restart many times while debugging.

Hey thiago.ecc, thanks for the suggestion.

I tried that using this bat script

C:\CALIBRE_8\Calibre\calibre-debug.exe -g

That's a portable install; I do most tests using portable calibre instances (different versions, distinct settings). What happens is that, when running it that way I have my system default library open instead of the one in the portable path. And it loads settings from the OS install as well... (%appdata%\calibre)

At one point I also tried Kovid's original way of debugging using calibre-customize but couldn't adapt it to my workflow with portable instances.

I get this when running --paths..

C:\CALIBRE_8\Calibre>C:\CALIBRE_8\Calibre\calibre-debug.exe --paths
CALIBRE_RESOURCES_PATH=C:\CALIBRE_8\Calibre\app\re sources
CALIBRE_EXTENSIONS_PATH=C:\CALIBRE_8\Calibre\app\b in
CALIBRE_PYTHON_PATH=

What's the correct way to debug a portable instance, loading the settings and library from the portable install path?

[thiago.eec]

Originally Posted by Comfy.n

Hey thiago.ecc, thanks for the suggestion.

You're welcome!

Originally Posted by Comfy.n

What's the correct way to debug a portable instance, loading the settings and library from the portable install path?

I don't know if there is a better way, but this is how I did. I used a bat script with the following content and saved inside 'Calibre Portable\Calibre':

@echo off
set CALIBRE_CONFIG_DIRECTORY=..\Calibre Settings
D:
cd "D:\Calibre Portable\Calibre"
calibre-debug -g

[Comfy.n]

Originally Posted by thiago.eec

You're welcome!


I don't know if there is a better way, but this is how I did. I used a bat script with the following content and saved inside 'Calibre Portable\Calibre':

@echo off
set CALIBRE_CONFIG_DIRECTORY=..\Calibre Settings
D:
cd "D:\Calibre Portable\Calibre"
calibre-debug -g

Brilliant! Thank you so much.