[Scribus] Scribus Digest, Vol 37, Issue 62

[Craig Ringer]

hovergo at net-tech.com.au wrote:

>Scribus crashing in Windows.
>
>I would be inclined to believe that it is windows crashing Scribus --  
>not Scribus crashing.
>2/3rds of the computers in my local work area crash in windows very 
>frequently and never crash in Linux.
>We use a raft of programs, not only scribus and all of them crash  with 
>windows-monotonous-regularity.
>
>When a crash occurrs remember ASWOS  (Always Suspect Windows Operating 
>System).
>  
>
That really changed when the NT-based OSes (NT, 2k, XP) went mainstream. 
These days it's ASDOA - Always Suspect Drivers Or Applications. 
Especially drivers. If you get a bluescreen (STOP error), the chances 
are VERY strong that it's a driver, or flakey hardware like an 
overheating CPU or video card. Program crashes are likely to be just 
that, though they can certainly be caused by things like old/flakey 
video drivers, particularly broken spyware, etc.

I've been keeping my eye out for some time to find a crash reporting 
tool for Windows that we might be able to use to get enough information 
to tell. Under Mac OS X the user can just send a detailed backtrace and 
system info dump by looking in the system log, and something like that 
would be cool. On Linux they have to get gdb (unless glibc detects the 
failure, eg a double free) but at least it's available and easy to give 
instructions for. Then again, I don't know if release binaries for 
windows apps even have the symbols in them that'd be required to 
generate a backtrace.

If anyone here has run into a good tool for this, I'd love to hear about 
it (I don't do Windows work on Scribus, but wouldn't mind being able to 
help out). Hard-to-reproduce one-off crash bugs are a real pain, and 
having some good data collection to find patterns could be quite 
interesting for them. Not just on Windows, either - easy-to-report crash 
dumps on Linux wouldn't suck either.

(By the way, when replying to a digest, please trim off the parts you're 
not replying to, and preferably change the subject).

--
Craig Ringer