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- <title>Reporting Bugs</title>
- <h1>Bug reporting</h1>
-
- Please try to give as much information as possible about what might have
- caused the problem. It may seem obvious, but if you have trouble with a
- particular site or particular page, then <em>please</em> include the URL
- with your report, because I can then visit the page myself and see if it
- fails for me too, and if so whether it fails the same way, and why.
-
- If you suffer messages such as "ArcWeb .... must exit immediately", then
- you should create a small RAM disc (64K is plenty), and issue the following
- command at the F12 prompt or in the <em>New Task</em> submenu on the Task Manager's menu:
-
- <dl><dd><tt>*Set DumpRegisters 1</tt></dl>
- When reporting bugs, please follow the instructions in the RAM:$.WebRegs file.
- This file contains information about what was going on at the time when the
- problem occurred, plus a few details about your system. If you object to
- any particular information (such as total machine RAM) being included, then
- remove it, bearing in mind that it may be part of the problem (and it may not).
- The information logged is currently:<ul>
- <li>What error condition occurred
- <li>The contents of the RISC OS exception dump area (as you would see if you
- had typed <tt>*ShowRegs</tt> at the CLI prompt.
- <li>The register save area maintained by the Shared C Library, not normally
- available, and hacked with great hackery from the data area inside the
- image, as this is far more useful for finding programming errors than
- the RISC OS save register area.
- <li>A stack backtrace - an audit trail of which function was calling which
- other function which was etc. so I can see how the address which caused
- the problem was reached.
- <li>Your OS version
- <li>Your primary processor type (normal ARM or StrongARM)
- <li>Your total RAM size
- <li>The slot size ArcWeb had when the fault occurred
- <li>The amount of memory free at the time the fault occurred
- <li>The amount of free disc space on the drive hosting the cache
- <li>ArcWeb's build date, build time and build version
- <li>A nice message giving instructions about where to mail the file
- </ul>
-
- <p>
- The more information that can be provided, the greater the chance that I can
- fix it quickly and issue a new version that corrects it for everyone else.
-
- <p>Please note that I cannot guarantee that I will e-mail you back to tell you
- that the problem is identified and/or fixed. I'm afraid I don't have enough
- time - and besides, you'd rather I spent what free time I do have fixing bugs
- and doing other enhancements, wouldn't you?
-
- <hr>
- <address><a href="mailto:S.N.Brodie@ecs.soton.ac.uk">S.N.Brodie</a></address>