UNO bindings for the Python programming language. To have much joy debugging python extensions you need to: a) edit pythonloader.py in your install setting DEBUG=1 at the top b) touch pyuno/source/module/pyuno_runtime.cxx and 'make debug=true' in pyuno Then you'll start to see your exceptions on the console instead of them getting lost at the UNO interface. Python also comes with a gdb script libpython$(PYTHON_VERSION_MAJOR).$(PYTHON_VERSION_MINOR)m.so-gdb.py that is copied to instdir and will be auto-loaded by gdb; it provides commands like "py-bt" to get a python-level backtrace, and "py-print" to print python variables. Another way to debug python code is to use pdb: edit some initalization function to insert "import pdb; pdb.set_trace()" (somewhere so that it is executed early), then run soffice from a terminal and a command-line python debugger will appear where you can set python-level breakpoints.