hovergo at net-tech.com.au wrote: >Scribus crashing in Windows. > >I would be inclined to believe that it is windows crashing Scribus -- >not Scribus crashing. >2/3rds of the computers in my local work area crash in windows very >frequently and never crash in Linux. >We use a raft of programs, not only scribus and all of them crash with >windows-monotonous-regularity. > >When a crash occurrs remember ASWOS (Always Suspect Windows Operating >System). > > That really changed when the NT-based OSes (NT, 2k, XP) went mainstream. These days it's ASDOA - Always Suspect Drivers Or Applications. Especially drivers. If you get a bluescreen (STOP error), the chances are VERY strong that it's a driver, or flakey hardware like an overheating CPU or video card. Program crashes are likely to be just that, though they can certainly be caused by things like old/flakey video drivers, particularly broken spyware, etc.
I've been keeping my eye out for some time to find a crash reporting tool for Windows that we might be able to use to get enough information to tell. Under Mac OS X the user can just send a detailed backtrace and system info dump by looking in the system log, and something like that would be cool. On Linux they have to get gdb (unless glibc detects the failure, eg a double free) but at least it's available and easy to give instructions for. Then again, I don't know if release binaries for windows apps even have the symbols in them that'd be required to generate a backtrace. If anyone here has run into a good tool for this, I'd love to hear about it (I don't do Windows work on Scribus, but wouldn't mind being able to help out). Hard-to-reproduce one-off crash bugs are a real pain, and having some good data collection to find patterns could be quite interesting for them. Not just on Windows, either - easy-to-report crash dumps on Linux wouldn't suck either. (By the way, when replying to a digest, please trim off the parts you're not replying to, and preferably change the subject). -- Craig Ringer
