strcat+strcat+strcat == baaad"

[Francois Gouget]

On Mon, 9 Dec 2002 vkxzjq6lg at 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 :-( ).


-- 
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
 Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't
                                 -- Eric Jong