Reporting Bugs

# 1.11.1 Reporting Bugs

If you encounter an unreported bug please submit detail regarding such to the Bug Tracker located at the XTrackCAD Fork Project Site.

Be sure to provide the three basic elements of a bug report: What you were doing at the time the bug occurred, what you expected to happen and what actually happened. This detail will help developers replicate the error, find and correct the offending code.

A Sample Bug Report Follows;

  After completing installation of XTrackCAD on a Dell Dimension PC with 128 MB of memory running Windows ME, the following error occurred when attempting to edit a Text Label;

  `Notice: allocateButt: Can't find 13. Do you want to save the layout?`

  Selecting either "Yes" or "No" results in a Windows error and XTrackCAD closes.

  The error can be replicated by opening the file named cascade.xtc. Set the magnification at 4:1. Attempting to move the text label named "Granville Island" located at the approximate grid coordinates of x=8", y=4' 5". Selecting the label causes the error to occur.

  The error is repeatable with other files contain text labels.

Always search the bug database first. Advice so good, we'll repeat it twice. Always search the bug database first. The odds are good that if you've found a problem, someone else found it too. If you spend a few minutes of your time making sure that you're not filing a duplicate bug, that's a few more minutes someone can spend helping to fix that bug rather than sorting out duplicate bug reports.

If you don't understand an error message, ask for help. Don't report an error message you don't understand as a bug. There are a lot of places you can ask for help in understanding what is going on before you can claim that an error message you do not understand is a bug. (Once you've understood the error message and have a good suggestion for a way to make the error message clearer, you might consider reporting it as a XTrackCAD Feature Request).

Be brief, but don't leave any important details out. This is a fine line to walk. But there are some general guidelines:

Remember the three basics: what you were doing, what you expected to happen, and what happened.

If you can recreate the problem the Macro>Record command can be used to record what happened. Try to isolate the problem by creating a minimal layout and recording as few commands as possible.

Don't report bugs about old versions. Every time a new version of XTrackCAD is released, many enhancements are added and known bugs are fixed. If you're using a version of XTrackCAD that's more than two revisions older than the latest version, you should upgrade to the latest version to make sure the bug you are experiencing still exists. (It's not a bad idea to upgrade even if your version is only a version behind the most current one.)

Only report one problem in each bug report. If you encounter two or more bugs that don't appear to be related create a separate bug report for each one. This makes the task of managing work assignments easier and may result in a quicker fix for the problem.