Martin Gregorie <martin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> on April 3rd wrote: > >On Fri, 2009-04-03 at 10:49 -0500, Austin English wrote: >> This has been proposed a few times before, mostly a Dr. Watson type >> debugger. A simple window to tell the user the program crashed, >> however, doesn't sound as familiar. I don't think, however, you'd find >> much support for it, and hardly anyone would want to spend time coding >> it. If you've got a patch, however, the odds are improved. >> >Austin, > >Is there any profiling information about the costs of generating >debugging output? > >By that I mean the relative costs of generating the debugging lines, >writing them to a file/displaying on a console. > This is an interesting concept that you are exploring. I've never heard of doing a cost analysis for providing users with error messages. I've read of the opposite, the cost of not providing this information. The old joke about the Mac error message "Like dude something went wrong and I have to reboot to fix it" would in this day be considered insufficient for troubleshooting. However, filling up a screen with a PE dump is just about as useful to the average end user. >If the cost of generating the lines is insignificant compared to normal >Wine non-debugged operation, then I have an suggestion of a way to >proceed. I also have tested ANSI C code that I've used in other >projects and which may be useful. > I think the question is will a user be as happy running Wine in debug mode where information is written to files as they would be with no debugging code. Of course, running without is faster and more user friendly as you are not writing constantly to the drive or screen. I like the method that WineHelper (one of the more useful pieces from the Darwine project) uses: It does not do anything until an error occurs as most programs do not output anything to stdin/stdout in graphical mode. Thus program operation is not interfered with. An additional feature is that the output of stdout/stderr can be dumped. I would like to see better error handling, aka the Windows/MacOSX dump which captures to a file and allows the user to report to Microsoft/Apple. The ignore feature is one thing to be added. James McKenzie > >Martin > > >
