On helping new developers

[Jimi Huotari]

On Mon, 17 Jun 2019 18:58:22 -0500
Zebediah Figura <z.figura12 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> It's a well-known fact that our wiki sucks and is out of date. I've been 
> making at least some effort to try to improve that. Not much, but...
> 
> In particular I've just done some lengthy expansion to the "debugging 
> hints" page: https://wiki.winehq.org/Debugging_Hints
> 
> As a new Wine developer I remember being frustrated by how difficult it 
> is to debug things. To a certain degree I still am, sometimes. While 
> being good at debugging applications in Wine really is a matter of 
> experience more than anything else, I do think there are some things 
> that can be taught, at least as a starting point. To that end I've tried 
> to sort of document my process of debugging, and as many specific tips 
> as I can think of, at that page.
> 
> This mail, then, is a call to help that. There are plenty of people 
> around who are far more experienced than me, so I'd really appreciate 
> any further tips that they can add to the page. Similarly, any blatant 
> misinformation that I've put in there would be best corrected immediately.
> 
> ἔρρωσθε,
> Zeb
> 
> 

Thanks a lot for putting the time and effort into that!  It seems
very useful indeed.

I was reading the article on Performance [1] just the other day,
which did leave me wanting for more.  Previously I've also read
the Debugging Wine [2] article a few times at least, but it seems a
bunch have been added there, too, since I last did so (years ago,
probably, before the new wikki set-up).

I had this issue with Final Fantasy XIV, that apparently no one else did,
which already should have pointed me towards doing a (really) clean
install of it.  Thing is, I was re-using the old data files, because
they're kind of big (25'ish GiBs), and I'd assumed a little that the
update check actually verifies the files, and re-downloads them if
need be...

I noticed the trial client worked just fine, so as a next thing I fed
the data files to 'md5sum' and compared them... they were indeed
different.  Granted, the trial and retail might have used different
files even to that extent, but mayhap that was unlikely, and so I
tried the trial big files with the retail client and it would work
again as well!

I think last that game was running for me, was back in 2017 (I don't
actively play it), so it was quite fun to see it work once more again.

And it wasn't even an issue with Wine in the end!  Did not see that one
coming.

Had I known the meaning of 'c0000005' before, it might have made things
faster (I did end up reading about it in Debug Channels [3], after I
had already resolved the issue).

1. https://wiki.winehq.org/Performance
2. https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_Developer%27s_Guide/Debugging_Wine
3. https://wiki.winehq.org/Debug_Channels
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