Reporting Bugs

[optigon]

Since Wings has been in development for more than 9 years, most of the obvious bugs have been eliminated. The bugs that remain usually only appear in certain circumstances.

Therefore, reporting that "feature X sometimes doesn't work" does not help. Given a lot of time, we could start reading all of the relevant code for feature X and hope to figure it out.

On the other hand, reporting that "feature X doesn't work when I try on the following model which you will find at some_site/.../some_model.wings" is much more useful. If we can reproduce a bug in action on one of our own computers, it is usually very easy to locate and correct the bug.

Here are some tips on how to get the bugs fixed quickly.

1. When you have posted a bug report, make sure to return to the bug report thread later to see if one of the developer has asked for additional details.

2. Provide all information needed for us to reproduce the bug on our own computers.

• If the problem occurs in a specific model, make the Wings file available at a web page (preferred way) or email it to one of the developers. Note that selections are saved in a Wings file, so if a selection is needed, do the selection before you save file.
  
• In other cases, describe how to reproduce the problem. Keep in mind that we are not mind readers.
  

3. If there is a crash dump and it is not too long, post it in the error report. If it is very long, post only the first part in the error report. (We'll ask you to provide the rest if we'll think that it will be useful.)

4. Additional useful information to provide:

• Operating system type and version.
  
• Type and driver version of graphic card (if it seems relevant to the problem at hand).
  
• Whether the bug exists in previous versions of Wings.
  

5. Typos and Wording. If you happen to come across any typos, wording issues or wording inconsistencies, you can report these as bugs (see above). When reporting wording problems, please include:

• The location of the string (how you come to see it on the screen).
  
• The problem with the string
  
• If possible, suggestions for its correction are nice too.
  

Thanks for reporting bugs!

optigon