From: vkxzjq6lg@cswebmail.com
Francois Gouget wrote:
Of course, that implies that we should promptly fix any such crash. Otherwise it just makes Wine unusable without any benefit.
That's the catch. I'm not approaching Wine as a Wine developer. Wine is almost ready for prime time now and as a non-Wine developer (who's roped in so far only as far as necessary to get the app I want to run running) I'm approaching it as a near production system.
When only hard core Wine developers were seeing it, opening the debugger made sense.
Wine is leaving the core development stage and now it's time to be arranging for bug reporting mechanisms which don't require that you be a programmer willing to start debugging Wine to get your applications running.
That means avoiding a raw debugger window and providing something more end user friendly. To me that means something like logging every non-dangerous failure possible rather than killing the application. Then, when the application finishes, winseerver can pop up a polite window telling the user that there was a problem and asking them to report it to the developers, making it easy to do that.
It definitely doesn't involve opening debugger windows. Those will scare away the end users who need to be submitting those logs so the developers can see which app or internal routine was breaking the rules and what needs to be fixed.
So: Wine's almost there (and congratulations on getting to the point where I can seriously write that!). Time to be thinking about what end users can handle and changing how garbage data reporting is handled to make it more friendly to them.
Can we do something like throw up a message box before loading the debugger, asking if we want to debug? Or perhaps there should be a command-line option to the debugger that presents said dialog, then use that option when starting the debugger in the event of an crash.
Perhaps this can be combined with some of the other ideas to create a reasonable user experience during a failure.
-- Jeff S
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