Provide the path to stdout.txt when an error occurres

[yannoo]

When a bug appears, I cannot copy-and-paste it because the rendering does not allow me to select letters. Making it select-able would fasten bug reports

[yannoo (yannoo)]

The file widelands.jpg was added: A crash report that cannot be copied-and-pasted

[SirVer (sirver)]

isn't the same information also in stdout.txt? Should widelands not by default tee output into a log file that is overwritten and not rely on SDL writing stdout.txt and stderr.txt?

[SirVer (sirver)]

also see bug #536503. My suggestion is to make widelands write it's output into a log file by default.

[SirVer (sirver)]

Setting to incomplete for bug sweeping.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

This would be nice, and make it easier to report issues. I think making the text selectable would be straight-forward, but then we'd presumably need some way to talk to the clipboard cross-platform. This is just pure speculation on my part, but the latter sounds rather complicated.

If we take a step back, I have an idea though. The goal here is that the user reports the bug and attaches the information given so that we are able to track down the bug and fix it. If this is indeed stored in the stdout.txt, we could simply mention that this error message (along with other information) was stored in stdout.txt, please include that when reporting.

[Gabriel Margiani (gamag)]

> ... was stored in stdout.txt, please include that when reporting.
The full path to stdout.txt would be needed, since "normal" players don't know it.

The full stdout.txt would help more than the error message anyway, so that seems to be a good solution.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

>The full path to stdout.txt would be needed, since "normal" players don't know it.

Good point. Ideally we should be able to display something similar to : "more info is located in [WHEREEVER WE ARE CURRENTLY WRITING THE LOG TO ON THIS OPERATING SYSTEM]". Is this path available in the dialog context, is this a constant set somewhere perhaps (as I don't think it is possible to change it at run-time)?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for widelands because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[SirVer (sirver)]

Alternatively and more modern would be something like: Widelands crashed, do you want to send the crash report to the developers for investigation. Of course, this would need more infrastructure on our site and I wonder if any bug was ever fixed using such information.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

>I wonder if any bug was ever fixed using such information.

Just to clarify, are you thinking about Widelands bugs which have been solved based on such information, or any project using automated reporting schemes? In the former case, sorta, except in most cases those issues have been reproducible so the steps to reproduce have been more important.

For projects in general, we can for instance look at https://errors.ubuntu.com/. I have to admit I'm not too familiar with this site, so take it with a grain of salt, but I believe any crash reported is checked for duplicates and grouped together. Issues which happen frequently will then become visible to developers. It is also possible to match against version numbers and check whether annoying crashers are triggered anymore in the latest version. (And to answer your question, I don't have any solid data on X bugs have been solved through this system)

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

Migrated to https://github.com/widelands/widelands/issues/1157