improvements for testing and reporting bugs
- From: Liviu Andronic <landronimirc@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: emelfm2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2012 09:29:04 +0200
Hello Tom
I would like to suggest several switches that, if implemented, would
much improve the testing experience and potentially raise the
usefulness of bug reports.
First, introduce a '--vanilla' CLI option. This would allow to run
emel with factory defaults, while upon exit it would not attempt to
save its config. This would allow ruling out (or not) configuration
differences when testing for a particular issue. To give an example, R
[1] comes with a '--vanilla' and bug reports are accepted only when
the issue can be reproduced in a vanilla session: this rules out
messed up user configs, or code errors when using default options.
This is how the option is described in 'man R':
--vanilla
Combine --no-save, --no-restore, --no-site-file, --no-init-file
and --no-environ
Second, add a '--buildopts' CLI option. For any given binary, this
option would be able to provide the user with the list of options
originally used to build the app. This can be useful when you have
several versions of R spread around---one installed via the package
manager, and considering that I'm also a packager, then I can have
several versions using the same prefix but built with different
options, making it hard to know which one is installed at any given
moment; and another one built from source---or when, as a user, you
simply don't know how the binary was built since you installed it from
your distro. In any case this info is useful when reporting bugs, and
I'm systematically unsure of what were the compile-time options of my
current build. Similar info is provided in Midori's [2]
'about:version' page.
And third, add a '--builddeps' CLI option. For any given binary, this
option would report the actual libraries used at compilation time.
Again, potentially useful for debugging and quickly understanding the
differences between two systems. This info is provided in Midori's
'about:version' page, but even better: it contains the info on
build-time and run-time libraries and versions. Below is an example of
such output.
What do you think about adding such functionality? Regards
Liviu
[1] http://www.r-project.org/
[2] http://twotoasts.de/index.php/midori/
### Midori output ###
Midori 0.4.6 (de.twotoasts.midori_986f8b3ab180c759ab5db95cc6f00d33__0)
GTK+ 2.20.1 (2.20.1)
Glib 2.24.1 (2.24.1)
WebKitGTK+ 1.2.7 (1.2.7)
libsoup 2.30.2
cairo 1.8.10 (1.8.10)
granite No
libnotify 0.4.5
single instance
libunique 1.1.6
Platform X11; Linux x86_64
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