Re: Stability and Gnome's image among users

[Telsa <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Wed, Aug 18, 1999 at 09:48:49AM -0400 or thereabouts, russnelson.com wrote:
>  >
>  > But working out what's causing the problem is hard.
> 
> Don't worry about that.  The best bug report is one that can be
> reliably reproduced.  It's best not to speculate why -- that can throw
> the bug report reader off the track.  Let them figure out why the
> problem occurs.

Yes, sorry. I wasn't trying to say I try to work out why it happens:
what I meant was that I have trouble knowing which program is part of
which package, and the bugs.gnome.org thing likes you to include the
package name, which I imagine it uses to sort out who gets the report.

The "About..." option tells you that this is program (whatever) and
version number (whichever). If in addition it told you that this
program was part of package (whatever), version (whichever), this
would speed things immensely.

One thing I have found out, incidentally, which helps when you
don't always run X:

For those of us who have the documentation installed on the system,
and who use some sort of packaging mechanism which updates the docs
as well as the program (rpm or dpgk), then doing ls /usr/doc/prog*
will often tell you the version number of the program, even if you're
not running Gnome and thus able to click on the "About.." at the
time. If you're in bash you can be even lazier: instead of typing
'ls /usr/doc/' then the first part of the program name and then the *, 
you can type 'ls /usr/doc/' then the first part of the program name
and just hit tab. You'll either get the rest filled in, or a flash or
beep. If you get the flash or beep, hit tab again and it will give
you all the possibilities in that directory. Try it with
'ls /usr/doc/gn' and hit tab twice to see what I mean. Handy if you
forgot to write the version number down before quitting gnome.

This works in Linux. I don't know where *BSD or Solaris put documentation,
nor whether it would work there. 

Someone will probably tell me this is a bad idea and why, now, but
it helps me :)

Telsa