As earlier announced in my April Fools' announcement and on Xdebug's twitter feed, I'm now releasing Xdebug 2.1.0RC1. This is the first Release Candidate and it addresses a number of issues found in the latest beta. As I usually do in release announcements, I will also be introducing a new feature in Xdebug 2.1 in this one.

In an article that I wrote a few months ago, I illustrated a few different reasons on why the shut-op operator (@) should be avoided. Although there are a few cases where it simple can not be avoided if you want to write notice-free code, the main reason why this operator should be avoided, is because it makes debugging quite a bit more difficult if errors are hidden.

Xdebug is a debugging aid to make debugging easier. So from version 2.1.0 there is a new configuration setting — xdebug.scream — that simply disables the effects of the @ operator. That means that all errors will be shown, of course, still listening to the error_reporting and display_errors settings. This functionality is not a novel thing, and the idea was lifted from the PECL scream package. However, I think this functionality fits in very well with all the other things that Xdebug has to offer.

Just to mention it once more, I have no intention of making Xdebug closed source. I spend a considerable amount of time in adding new features and addressing issues, so I would appreciate it that if consider a donation in case Xdebug has saved you time and effort in debugging your application. If you have comments or suggestions to improve Xdebug, please write to the mailinglist.