Re: Handling non-technical users

[Tim Moore <tmoore tembel org>]

>>>>> Dave Glowacki writes:

> As an example of a better approach toward software bugs, check out the
> Wine project (www.winehq.com.)  When Wine fails, you can easily rerun
> it with some debugging flags and have it automatically generate a trace
> of the program execution and a final dump of the pertinent registers.
> (Wine is emulating a Windows machine so all this information is easily
> obtained.)  The trace/dump info can then be mailed in to the developers.
> People don't need to learn how to use yet another tool, they just add
> a flag to the commandline.

Perhaps something like Full Circle's Talkback is what we need.

http://www.fullcirclesoftware.com

In a nutshell, an application somehow negotiates a session with their
program.  When the application crashes (or in various other events)
their program collects register contents, stack traces, and arbitrary
other data and sends it in an SHTTP request back to the developers.

Netscape uses it for 4.5 on Intel Linux.

Of course, it's not Free.  But a Free clone of it, which interfaces
with the bug tracking system and perhaps handles intermittently
connected machines, would be great!

Tim Moore