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.
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On Mon, 9 Dec 2002 vkxzjq6lg@cswebmail.com wrote:
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.
If Wine is properly configured for a production environment the user would not be confronted to a debugger window. Instead the debugger would be invoked in non-interactive mode and dump a stack trace, list of running threads and such other useful information to stderr which would typically be captured and sent to a log file. The user can then be instructed to send that log file to whomever handles support. This provides that support person with the information needed for a first diagnosis.
Of course the application still crashes which is a problem but it's pretty likely that if it did not, then either that problem would never have been uncovered, or it would have crashed a bit later, thus making it much harder to diagnose the real cause for the problem.
Also, before putting Wine in a production environment, someone should take on the task of testing it and make sure it is suitable for the task at hand, i.e. that it won't crash every five minutes.
[...]
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.
That prompts another issue. Currently Wine spews out so many spurious messages that there is no way to do what you say. Just running Solitaire would cause the above scheme to claim that very bad things happened during execution and the please could the user report the problems.
It's not that the above is not a good idea. It's just that a lot of work remains to be done with the traces and debug messages issued by Wine before it becomes feasible (and it's sure to be somewhat controversial too :-( ).
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Francois Gouget -
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