On 21-Jan-09, at 8:12 AM, Nick Guenther wrote: > On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 4:03 PM, Garth Dahlstrom <[email protected]> > wrote: >> I have repaired cmetrics in Mixxx such that building with "scons >> cmetrics=1" will now cause Mixxx to report back information to >> metrics.mixxx.org. >> >> The messages are being saved, unparsed into a database... I started >> writing code to parse it (since we don't have the original server- >> side >> implementation), but decided it is a waste of effort until we can see >> if the messages cmetrics sends are actually of any value to Mixxx >> developers or the community at large. >> >> So if there are folks out there who would mind paricipating in this >> kind of data collection you are welcome to build with cmetrics=1; I'm >> thinking we can do a dump of the dataset for people to play with at >> the end of a couple of weeks if people are interested in checking it >> out. After that we can reevaluate if cmetrics is worth having >> around/turned on. >> > > IF we have a lot of data, then cmetrics is useful as a guideline. MS > Word would have good data from such a thing. Mixxx? Probably not so > much. It's probably way more effective to just point people at the bug > tracker if they want their voice heard. >
The purpose of CMetrics was two-fold: 1) To give us better demographics data and information about our users computers. Back when we were working on 1.6.0, we found that it was getting difficult to make certain design decision without understanding the hardware setups that our users have. Even in the short time that CMetrics was working, we had some good stats that helped us target development more. (As an example, the CMetrics data told us we needed to work on Hercules support more.) 2) To help us track down bugs that are otherwise impossible for us to track. Specifically, with 1.5.0, we encountered discovered a handful of "Mixxx doesn't run for me on Windows" bugs, but we had no idea that they were there because nobody was reporting them. In addition, we were unable to reproduce most of these bugs because we didn't have backtraces, etc. We knew this was still a major problem with 1.6.0 Beta 1, and now that 1.6.0 has been released, it's clear that it's STILL an issue. I don't know how to troubleshoot these bugs, because we have no data. CMetrics was able to capture stack dumps on Windows, and John had it set up so that you could load the stack dump into Visual Studio and debug Mixxx in the state that it had crashed on someone else's computer. This seemed like the holy grail for us, but our Windows development sort of died, so I'm not even sure if anyone besides John ever tried to do this. (Regardless, we're still constantly getting screwed over by these crash-at-startup bugs, so if a Win32 guru knows how we can capture _useful_ debugging data on them, please share.) Thanks, Albert ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword _______________________________________________ Mixxx-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mixxx-devel
