Re: [Bibdesk-users] Crash Reports and Sampling

[Adam R. M. <ama...@ma...>]

On Jan 30, 2006, at 20:52, Alex Montgomery wrote:

> Folks (esp. developers):
>
> Kudos on the 1.2.2 release. I can now tell my beta-shy friends  
> (wimps!) to download it.

They should download the next nightly, since I just fixed the crash  
that you submitted              ...doh!  You must have been sorting  
by Booktitle, right?

> I was recently reading John Gruber's excellent post on crash  
> reports <http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/smart_crash_reports>  
> when it occurred to me that I've never heard any comment from the  
> developers on whether (or how) to send in crash reports.

We use ILCrashReporter, and aside from its occasional flakiness,  
crash reports get sent to the bibdesk-crashes list.  ILCrashReporter  
only affects BibDesk, unlike the input manager solution, but doesn't  
always quit properly and won't work behind some firewalls.  If you  
don't get feedback on a crash, feel free to submit the log with a bug  
report.

There were two nasty crashers in 1.2.1 that I fixed after seeing the  
crash reports; one that occurred when you tried to open a local file  
that didn't exist anymore, and another that occurred in the file  
content search.  Neither issue was reported separately as a bug, as  
far as I recall.

> You can read the post if you want to read the whole deal, but to  
> put it simply, whenever BibDesk crashes, a crash report is put into  
> ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter called BibDesk.crash.log. I'd actually  
> had no idea.

And those reports are very helpful, /especially/ if you describe what  
you were doing when it crashed; even a sentence is enough of a clue.   
Please only send the most recent crash, though, if you file a bug  
report!  Also, check the console for output, since sometimes  
exceptions are logged there.

> The other point is about sampling. Occasionally we're requested to  
> 'sample BibDesk 10 -file ~/Desktop/BibDeskSample.txt' or something  
> similar. Should we wait for requests to do this? Or if we find that  
> BibDesk is seemingly beachballed, should we do this and report what  
> we were doing at the time? Again, report it as s bug or email it  
> somewhere? If so, where?

If you have a beachball, file a bug report on sourceforge and attach  
the sample, with full details of how to reproduce it.  I usually look  
into performance bugs for the fun of it, since I like to play with  
Shark and OmniObjectMeter.

Otherwise, you can complain here, and I'll tell you to send me a  
sample; if you have the dev tools, Spin Control is nice for catching  
beachballs automatically, but set it to only look at one application.

-- Adam