[Libreoffice-qa] How Can I Provide More Info For Developers

[julien2412]

Just some thoughts here.
First backtrace are very useful only if they contain symbols.
It's more difficult to retrieve bt on Windows than on Linux (I don't know
how MacOs could be compared with them)
It seems no daily builds contain symbols or missed it
(http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/).
It's more complicated to compile on Windows (a little less for MacOs) than
for Linux. At least, it seems so according to what I read.
We can't expect any user build sources or have an idea about what's a
backtrace/strace/Valgrind trace is
As a simple QA contributor, I think preserving time of Devs is very
important, more important than QA people time, because:
- dev guys are few compared to the size of the project, especially in some
parts like Base
- it's easier to learn the basics of QA than C++. Of course, QA time mustn't
be spoiled because they're few too

But:
Main (all?) Linux distributions provide the LO symbols package so you don't
need to build LO to retrieve useful bt.
Doc efforts have been made to help retrieved bt in:
- Linux
(http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/BugReport#How_to_get_backtrace_.28on_Linux.29)
- Windows
(http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/BugReport#How_to_get_backtrace_.28on_WINDOWS.29)
A great video has been made by jesus corrius to explain how to install the
required tools on Windows and retrieve an useful bt and guys like bfo
retrieved a lot of bt (greatly appreciated for Windows only trackers).
- wiki pages (eg: Native build and bug reporting) and BSA bring and help a
lot new comers (computer student or simple user) who take some dev tasks or
do some QA. So let's keep on to improve these tools

The fact is we can't guess in general the computer skill of a reporter so we
can only ask politely these info by giving him/her the links quoted above.
It can't be an offense or a scarecrow to ask technical info to people ! :-)

Julien



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