> I've noticed this myself -- in fact, I always get a tad nervous > and mentally review recent changes before hitting "Undo" in case I did > anything slightly out of the ordinary that may trigger a crash.
If "undo" is something which commonly causes crashes for you, then I think you should try to categorize/reproduce the crashes. While I agree with your concept on a MoleculeDocument, IMHO, there isn't a good level of "bug cleanup" and that's critical for the reasons you mentioned. What we probably need is: 1) Periodic stabilization freezes to focus on bug fixing 2) Nightly debug-enabled builds 3) Automated GUI "fuzz testing" Unfortunately, one of the hardest problems for me are Windows crashes. Many times, I have a hard time reproducing on Mac, and never know if it's a Windows issue, a Qt/Windows bug, a random driver crash, etc. (For example, one of my students had issues on Win7 until he upgraded his graphics driver.) But with Open Babel, there's a systematic culture of strong bug-fixing throughout the development, and particularly before a release. The current development master hasn't seen that level of QA testing. That's point #1. Point #2, I'd love to see if we can embed some level of send-the-crash-report code. In many apps I use, this is invaluable to the developers, and it lets our users know we're serious about fixing crashes. I emphasize the nightly builds, because it means we can attempt to fix bugs for remote users and they can see if it works. We'd also get back-traces on Windows crashes! http://kb.mozillazine.org/Breakpad (But other solutions probably exist.) Point #3, I've used in the Avogadro Mac builds -- basically it's a program that sends mouse and key events randomly, trying to force crashes: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~bart/fuzz/ The clang compiler also looks like it has some new memory and race error detection tools: http://code.google.com/p/address-sanitizer/ http://code.google.com/p/data-race-test/ -Geoff ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Learn Windows Azure Live! Tuesday, Dec 13, 2011 Microsoft is holding a special Learn Windows Azure training event for developers. It will provide a great way to learn Windows Azure and what it provides. You can attend the event by watching it streamed LIVE online. Learn more at http://p.sf.net/sfu/ms-windowsazure _______________________________________________ Avogadro-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/avogadro-devel
