tips on reporting OOo bugs

Caolan McNamara caolanm at redhat.com
Thu Jul 14 12:55:57 UTC 2005


Some tips for reporting bugs that might be helpful. OOo is quite big,
and it links to and uses extensively a lot of stuff and so hoovers up a
lot of problems that are not always OOo bugs, so...

A) A crash on startup might be a crash in some opengl lib, not OOo
itself, get the source at
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/attachment.cgi?id=108799
and gcc testgl.c -o testgl -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lX11 -lGL to compile
and run it, if it also crashes it's not an OOo bug.

B) if it happens on an x86_64 box, remember that OOo is a 32bit app,
firefox is 32bit on the same platforms, see if it has the same problem
as well.

C) generally check that similiar applications don't behave the same way,
e.g. if firefox/gedit/glxgears do the same thing as OOo then it's
unlikely to be an OOo bug

D) if the crash dialog appears, paste in the stacktrace it gives you
into your bugreport.

E) mention if you are using KDE or GNOME, it often matters. If you have
non fedora-supplied kde theme engines installed, try one of the
supported ones.

F) if there is an error/warning message, say what the error message is

G) if it happens with a particular document, attach the document. If you
can, delete the parts of the document down to the smallest test case
that reproduces the problem. "Scroll to page 912 and the graphic is
misplaced" is way less appealing than having a one page example.

H) if you think there is something wrong with what is being displayed,
attach a screenshot. I might not understand your description. e.g.
"formula font is wrong", is it the font used in the text area for
editing the formula, or is it the font used to display the formula. Did
you mean the math editor, or did you actually mean formulas in calc.

I) Try not to tag things onto bugs with "and this unrelated thing
doesn't work", or "yeah that fixed it, but something different is still
not the way I want it", mutating bugs are really difficult to deal with.
There's no problem opening multiple bugs, it's easier to merge bugs
together if they turn out to be the same thing than to unmunge them into
seperate problems.

J) if you know you have something unusual about your setup, mention it.
e.g. .doc documents created with msword running under *wine* don't open
in OOo as opposed to just saying ".doc files don't open in OOo". Or say
"saving to a samba share doesn't work", vs "saving doesn't work".

K) if you can, install the debuginfo and 
> gdb /usr/lib/openoffice.org/program/soffice.bin
(gdb) run -writer
(gdb) bt
and paste in the backtrace

(-writer or -calc or -impress or -math or -draw)

L) it's nice when someone finds that a bug got cleared in an update and
mentions it in an old unclosed bug, but not so useful when it's an
unprompted note to say that the problem is still there.

M) "this is unacceptable" is not good motivational practice.

C.




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