Puts not working - Anyone else?

We found it out: What a Podium programmer was trying to do is to control verbosity (for their extension). But instead of setting $VERBOSE = true through the console only during debugging, they were muting puts globally for everyone else.

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That’s disconcerting. :frowning:
These things are checked when extensions are uploaded to EW. But for anything not hosted there we have no control.

We will be messaging our new static analysis tool more though: GitHub - SketchUp/rubocop-sketchup: Rubocop cops for SketchUp - test against our Extension Warehouse technical requirements and other pitfalls
Encouraging extension developers to make use of this as they work on their extensions. Catches a large number of common violations and even provide some general advice.

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Probably lots of clients using the GUI without problems. I’m not sure if the people who responded to you understood the problem.

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In my experience, a lot of Mac users in General do not exit programs (File->Quit) and put the Mac in sleep mode.
This preventing to notify the ‘not responding’ at all.

Any news on this? Have they acknowledged yet that this is a real problem?

If a coder can redefine puts and there are no routines to find and correct it, I can’t help to worry of about the rest of the code base. Do they use global variables, several root namespaces, attribute names that aren’t prefixed with the extension or author name, redefining more methods, changing base/core classes etc? Of course no user would experience and report an issue in such case, unless another extension contained the same fault, and happened to use the exact same name.

And of course a lot of clients don’t find the puts issue either. You have to be among those that write ruby code yourself to notice there is a problem to begin with, and have a certain level of Ruby experience to know about everything can be redefined at runtime, and how to find where. We are talking of a handful percents of users.

Coding like this is like building a weaker frame than the construction norm demands or leading blackwater sewage to the graywater sewage system. Will the people living in the house notice? Not likely. Is it wrong? Certainly. Does the fact that people don’t notice make it any better? Absolutely not.

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I have not heard anything more from Podium
about this issue. They said their programmer would look into it after the got their plugins working with SU 2019.

I know this much - my plugins all worked just fine with SU 2019 without having to change a single line of code.

I am at a loss to understand why any experienced programmer would go through the trouble of redefining basic ruby methods.

Sadly, you must press Podium, and if necessary c/c this thread to show everyone’s disquiet.
If is not a complex thing to resolve - they should do it forthwith !

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You are assuming this programmer is experienced. I wouldn’t make that assumption.

I did not make an assumption. The statement was in jest, a double entendre even sardonic.

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David from Podium has finally emailed me saying he believes that he has a fix. I will ask him to respond to this thread

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Is that fix a “#” or a Del of 3 lines?

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I have no idea yet what they will provide as a fix