since we are currently discussing a lot about lister plugins (manual/automatic selection, etc.), there is one more feature that might be very helpful to debug and optimize the overall plugin configuration in TC:
When loading a file in lister/QV, several plugins might be tried until a working one is found. This leads to (avoidable) delays and in some cases TC even hangs/crashes if one of the plugins hangs/crashes. In both cases, it is difficult to see which plugin caused which delay or even the erroneous one. Thus, I recommend to capture the order in which the plugins were tried along with how much time was used by each plugin. This (and some more) information could be viewed in a simple table (accessible through the context menu or as a new entry in the Options menu).
Example:
Code: Select all
plugin duration success totalLoadTime detectString <more information>
plugin1 20ms - ...
plugin2 30ms - ...
plugin3 10ms YES 60ms ...
plugin4 30ms - ...
plugin5 20ms YES 50ms ...
plugin6 10ms - ...
plugin1 22ms - ...
plugin2 31ms - ...
plugin3 15ms YES 78ms ...
From the list, users and plugin developers can easily see for different files to be viewed:
- plugin performance including load time jitter,
- problems with certain plugins,
- optimization potential for the TC plugin configuration (detect strings, order in "View by file type", etc.).
And, I understand that implementing the table means some effort for Mr. Ghisler.
Therefore, some of the information could at least be added to the log files. E.g., "trying to use <plugin> on <file>" as the last log entry would clearly indicate which plugin has crashed TC.
BTW: Such log entries would also be useful for other plugin types (sometimes I encounter crashes when entering archives through packer plugins. Then, I never know which plugin has caused the crash.
What do you think?
BR
funkymonk