Annual Reminder: How To Ask For Help

[Kenneth Brody]

On 5/26/2011 4:33 PM, Bob Rasmussen wrote:
> On Thu, 26 May 2011, Kenneth Brody wrote:
>
>> ...
>>> http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html
>>>
>>> This one is called "How to report bugs effectively", and it's by Simon
>>> Tatham whom some of you will recognize -- all right, all right; let's not
>>> always see the same hands -- as the author of the PuTTY terminal emulator.
>
> Simon touches indirectly on a favorite point of mine, which I summarize
> thus: "You are not allowed to use the words 'something like' when
> reporting an error message" :-)

Also, don't pick and choose some random word(s) from the error message, and 
ignore the rest.

Way back in the days of MS-DOS, we used something called "DOS/4GW" to use 
32-bit "protected mode" on 386 and higher CPUs.  Well, if the program 
crashed, it would give a dump of all sorts of information[1], along with a 
register dump and status information.  Someone kept reporting to fpsupport 
that he was getting "granular errors" from filePro.  It took a bit of 
investigation (read, "numerous attempts to get the person to explain what he 
meant by that") to figure out what was happening.  Among all the information 
given, the phrase "byte granular" appeared twice, in the status for the code 
and stack segments.  Hence, "granular error".


[1] See, for example, <http://vogons.zetafleet.com/files/trglidoserror.gif>

-- 
Kenneth Brody