Wow Ace Review

Addon Author: The BugSack Team

SVN: Whats this
http://svn.wowace.com/root/trunk/!BugGrabber
http://svn.wowace.com/root/trunk/BugSack

Rating:

Description

If you use addons in WoW you’ve seen that anouing pop-up window take over you screen when an error happens in an addon. I’s it always great when that happens in the middle of combat or some other critical time? BugSack solves that problem by grabbing any errors thrown by addons and tossing them in a bag. By default it also plays a sound file to let you know the something went wrong but otherwise keeps the error from getting in your way. Obviously the addon with the problem might stop functioning etc. IE this isn’t going to fix the bug just keep it from getting in your face. If you are using FurBar BugSack will also place a little Sack icon on you FuBar that you can mouse over to see any bugs in the sack so you can figure out which addon is causing the problem

Another nice thing about BugSack is many errors that pop-up in the blizzard error pop-up and too long it display properly so ofter you can’t even tell what really caused the problem. BugSack lets you see the entire error message and if multiple errors happen you can view them all. You can even go back and view errors from previous gaming sessions, great feature for addon authors.

Ever wanted to report the exact error text to the addon author so it could get fixed? BagSack makes that easy also. In game you can view the messages including going back to previous gaming sessions. Out of game you can go into your saved variables folder and open up the BugSack.lua file and cut and past the error text from there to send to the author.

BugSack is really made up of 2 parts. The reason for the 2 parts is !BugGrabber is keep to an absolute minimum of code without any requirements for any other code, ie libraries or dependencies, to avoid as much as possible it generating an error message itself.

First there is !BugGrabber. !BugGrabber is what is doing all the work of capturing the error messages. It has the “!” to get it loaded as early as possible so it can capture other addon’s errors that might happen when they load up. WoW loades addons in alphabetical order so the exclamation mark gets it loaded up before other addons.

Then there is BugSack itself that is simply used for the UI part. IE it is what is used to give you a way to see the error messages !BugGrabber caught.

IMHO BugSack and !BugGrabber are very nearly a must have addon if you use very many addons at all. Lets face it we’ve all seen that annoying error pop-up messages and they always seem to show up at the worst possible time. These 2 little gems solve that little annoyance. If you do any addon development then these are a must have IMHO. I couldn’t imagine playing around with lua code again without having these installed first.