Hacking:How To Report Valentina Bugs

From Seamly

How To Report Valentina Bugs

If you find a bug or think you find a bug, it is very important to report it. If the developers don’t know it is broken (or might be broken), they can’t fix it. So there you are at your computer trying to do something with Valentina and it freaks out at you. It can be a frightening experience at times.

First, Next, Third

First: Get out a piece of paper or open a text file and scribble down everything you can remember about what you were doing when it happened. Also write down the exact wording of any error messages you received.

Next: Go away and yell and scream and do whatever you need to do to relax again. Your next step will be to brave Issue Tracker. It is used to track bug reports and requests for enhancements (see also why we are using issue tracker).

Third: Check to see if your bug has been reported yet. Go to the Current Bug List to see if something that looks like your bug has been reported yet. Don’t worry if it has, you can still help. See the section: #Enhancing Bug Reports. If you can’t find something that sounds like your bug there, you will need to report it.

Getting Ready to Report and Reporting a Bug

The goal of the following is to give the developers as much information about what goes wrong as possible. This helps them find out what needs to be fixed.

The Steps

  1. Use valentina --version or the about dialog to check your Valentina version. Next check with http://valentinaproject.org/ to see what the most recent Valentina release is. If your Valentina is old, update then try to to reproduce the bug. Your bug may have been fixed in the most recent release. If you are running Valentina from Mercurial, update and recompile it.
  2. Attempt to reproduce the problem. Go do what you were doing when it happened and see if you can do it again.
    If using Valentina for GNU/Linux, start the program from a terminal with the command valentina. Sometimes the program will output error messages that can help. This is especially important if Valentina crashes completely without warning. After reproducing the bug, copy the error messages from your terminal into somewhere where you can save them for the bug report. It is better to give too much information than not enough.
    To narrow down the exact cause of the problem, attempt to reproduce it in other ways. Prepare yourself to explain how to reproduce it in your bug report. If you are running Valentina in another language, try switching your Valentina to English so you can report menu items exactly with the English menu item name. It helps - developers generally understand English. If you cannot reproduce the bug, assume it was some weird freak event then don’t report it. If it recurs, consult with your mailing list. Perhaps someone else can find the key to reproducing it.
  3. Prepare to face the horror. Go to issue tracker. If you don’t have a login yet, follow the directions to create one. The reason to do this and report a bug with your e-mail address is so the developers can contact you if they have any questions. That way if we miss some useful tidbit of debugging information, they can tell you what to do to get it. Log in.
  4. Select “Create issue”. This opens the actual entry form.
  5. Here you have to tell the developers everything about your system, your version of Valentina, and your bug. Just do your best to tell them about it. A crappy bug report is better than no report at all, but if you write down everything you can clearly, you will create a decent bug report.
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