AW: Getting Help With Bugs (was: Re: AW: 0.9.17 and other issues)

[Roland Kaeser]

Hello

Thanks. These are good ideas.  I hope I have done my best yet to support the developpers. I had already good feedbacks with patches to test against a wine version for fixing a certain problem.  But also sometimes I don't have the time (other things keep me really busy) to make that wide testes. As far as I see that I can file a useful bug report with less than a half day I see to get the time to make more intense tests to get a good quality bug report. On other side, I also see bugs which are completely (or no fix replay) untouched since they where reported. See Bugs #3599  #3611 #3800. The other part is (and I think I'm not alone with this) that I can only maintain a limited apps at a time. There whould be much more apps to maintain (the ones I know from my daily business) but currently I don't have the resources to do this. So I hoped that  I can start with a "most important list" and work on this list as maintainer until they are completely working with wine to go
 forward for new ones to get them working. But I noticed that I working still on the same count of apps.  Maybe i'ts not important for all but here a small list of the apps which are regulary requested to be working on Linux (out of the box):

    - Corel Draw 9-13 (much often, not just by myself)
    - MS Office XP / 2003 (specially Outlook and Access) (sorry)
    - MS Project (sorry again)
    - Photoshop / Illustrator / InDesign
    - Adobe Premiere (I know its nearly impossible)
    - Lotus Notes (6.5.x / 7.0)
    - DentalLab XP (a small erp solution for Dental Technicans)
    - The Nokia Sync Software for their mobiles
    - Serveral Tools to feed GPS navigation PDA's
    - Adobe Acrobat (Professional) (I don't know why)
    - NavBox Pro Plan (Aviatics Application) (private pilots)
    - PCMet (Meteo app for aviatices (private pilots))
    - AustroControl (Meteo app for aviatices (private pilots))
    - Pocket FMS (Navigation Software etc.)
    
I know there are a lot of others which I cannot rember yet. It whould need to take a small survey but I know there are others.
I also know that for the most of the listed apps are good linux equivalents avialable. As I said before, its (my) goal to bring the people frist to a linux desktop. switching from the windows apps to their linux alternatives can be made later when theyself recognize that the native linux app is more powerful than their windows version.

Roland



----- Ursprüngliche Mail ----
Von: Robert Shearman <rob at codeweavers.com>
An: Roland Kaeser <roli8200 at yahoo.de>
CC: wine-devel at winehq.org
Gesendet: Dienstag, den 11. Juli 2006, 17:17:55 Uhr
Betreff: Getting Help With Bugs (was: Re: AW: 0.9.17 and other issues)

Roland Kaeser wrote:

> <snip silly messages going back and forth about opensource>


The following is not specific for you, but something I hope can help 
others out that are in your situation:

There are a number of things you can do to make your bugs more likely to 
be fixed by volunteer developers:
1 File a bug!
2. Describe the bug accurately. If it is not completely obvious, 
describe what the program should be doing and what actually happens.
3. Only describe one bug per bugzilla entry, unless you think they are 
related. Doing otherwise will probably cause your second problem to be 
ignored.
4. Provide debug messages printed when reproducing the bug.
5. Use a standard Wine configuration. This includes not mixing native 
and builtin DCOM dlls and not using WineTools. In fact, try to use as 
many builtin DLLs as possible.
6. Try to reproduce the bug in a freely downloadable version of the 
application (for example, a demo or trial version) and provide a link in 
the bug. (Note that having to fill in a form with details to download a 
program puts me off trying to fix a bug, but others' opinions may be 
different.)
7. If you suspect the bug is in a certain component due an error message 
in a dialog box or on the console and you know which debug channel it 
corresponds to then attach a log of that debug channel to the bug.
8. Be repsonsive to developers asking for you to retest, try different 
dlls and create debug logs. You can be pro-active, but be careful to not 
be annoying. Deriding Wine or Wine developers is likely to be seen as 
annoying and your bug will be ignored. Testing the bug on each release 
of wine (or on a less regular basis) and reporting its status is 
welcomed and will show that you care about the bug being fixed and that 
you will be responsive if a developer investigates the bug further.

-- 
Rob Shearman





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