Re: GNOME crash page

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

Hi,

I'm going to cc bugzilla-devel-list, because I think your email sheds
some light on things we've messed up in bugzilla, even if part of the
email is not relevant to them.

On 11 Apr 2005 19:54:08 +0200, Einar Schlereth <eet schlereth telia com> wrote:
> 
> Hello Ellijah,
> finally I can talk resp. write to someone.
> You have to know that I'm a writer, journalist and translator.
> I'm working with PC for 20 years but always considered the PC just as
> a tool. So I don't know a damn about how all these things function.
> So I beg your pardon if some of my questions perhaps sound crazy.
> Well the problem:
> Just when the Red Hat icon comes up there comes also up the following
> window:

> contact the GNOMEs programcrashpage for more information (in swedish).

Is that all it says?  Any chance you could take a screenshot?  That
window *is* bug-buddy.  For me, what it says is

  The Application "bug-buddy" has quit unexpectedly.

  You can inform the developers of what happened to help them fix it.  Or you
  can restart the application right now.

  Restart Application          Close          Inform Developers

(The words on the last line are part of three separate buttons)

Of course, there have been changes since Red Hat 9.x, but I believe
there was still an option to submit a bug report.  Did you not have
such an option?

> I was cliquing on this link and up came BUGZILLA instead of GNOME. So I
> was irritated. And no information. I don't know what Bugzilla is and I
> didn't got an idea what that huge website means and what to do.

Bugzilla is used as Gnome's online database of reports about crashes,
wanted features, problems, etc.  The front page does have lots of
information.  There's a "Our simple bug assistant  makes it easy to
submit a bug report..." area near the top in the second column and if
you click on "simple bug assistant" you can report a bug.  Wouldn't
the second column be the first place where you look?  And isn't
"simple bug assistant" what you're scanning for when you realize
there's too much information and are just trying to find a link to
enable you to "report a bug"?  Hehe, just kidding.  Its a sucky,
overloaded, non-prioritized, and poorly worded interface (which is as
much my fault as anyone's).  But that's another bug...

> Notwithstanding I submitted to bugzilla and got a password. I wrote
> again and as an answer I got a mail that said that my message bounced.

The password you got was from an automated program; the account it was
sent from is only used by that program.  You weren't intended to send
a message to it.  ;-)  Maybe we should make that more clear.

The account and password is supposed to be used at the
bugzilla.gnome.org website.  You only need to login when you try to
perform some other action (such as reporting a bug), though you can
log in manually (with the "Log in" link at the very bottom of the page
at the rightmost part of the bottom line.)

> Then I tried several times with gnome but forget it.

I would be interested to hear of the other ways you tried to contact
people, just to see possible ways we are failing.

> Now I got a contact.
> First: I still don't know weather it is technical failure, an updating
> problem, a bug, a virus or a worm.

Well, without more information, we don't know either.  However, I'm
nearly certain that it's due to a bug, and one that has been fixed
nearly two years ago...

> And I don't know either how to use a
> bug-buddy and what that means (I never had problems with bugs etc).

bug-buddy is a program that should come up when something else
crashes.  It ought to give you an opportunity to report the problem
that occurred, while trying to gather extra information (in particular
something called a "stack trace" that can help developers a lot) to go
with information you type.  You can also launch bug-buddy manually
(it's the "Bug Report Tool" option under the Programming submenu of
the main taskbar menu).  Alternatively, you can go to
bugzilla.gnome.org and report bugs from there.

> My Red Hat version is 9.0 but the Gnome version I don't know (I know I'm
> an idiot with these things). Evolution is 1.2.

Red Hat 9 was shipped with Gnome 2.2.  We'd need more information to
determine which bug you have encountered, but if I were to take a
guess I'd say it's bug 111147.  However, it and several other bugs
have been fixed years ago.  Since the release of Gnome 2.2, there have
been multiple newer versions of Gnome released (2.4, 2.6, 2.8, and
2.10, plus multiple point releases of each of the first three) which
have fixed several issues from earlier releases.  You may want to
consider upgrading.

If you'd like us to take a look at your specific problem, though, we'd
need a stack trace.  You'd need to see
http://live.gnome.org/GettingTraces for more information on how to do
so.

> There is no error-message only the above-mentioned sentence.

Is there not any other words or buttons or anything in that window? 
That just doesn't sound right--bug-buddy really should have more than
a single sentence...  If it doesn't, then it looks like you were hit
with multiple bugs.  :(

Hope that helps,
Elijah