[Bug] Intermittent debugger failures on Ballerina projects with Bal persist sources

[NipunaRanasinghe]

Description

The Ballerina debugger intermittently fails to show breakpoint hits when debugging Ballerina projects that include Bal persist sources.

As discussed in internal-support-ballerina/issues/803, we observed that this issue arises because the debugger relies on the Project API, which does not fully support scenarios involving changes related to Bal persist sources.

To address this, we need certain fixes (or possibly new APIs) from the Project API. Once these improvements are available, we plan to release the debugger-side fixes accordingly.

Steps to Reproduce

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Affected Version(s)

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OS, DB, other environment details and versions

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Related area

-> Debugger

Related issue(s) (optional)

#43537

Suggested label(s) (optional)

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Suggested assignee(s) (optional)

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[NipunaRanasinghe]

Please find the meeting notes from my discussion with @sameerajayasoma , @azinneera, and @gayaldassanayake on the above.

• We can consider using a different file extension for custom definition files (such as for persist and the upcoming service definitions feature) instead of .bal. New extension types (e.g., .baldef or .balspec) could help avoid unforeseen issues in the platform. This change would also resolve the debugger issue, as the debugger would no longer try to treat these files as standard Ballerina source files.

• Until we reach this solution, we’ll implement a temporary workaround by adding certain Project API utilities directly in the debugger.