Crash report procedure

[Sivakatirswami]

(MORE THAN YOU WANT TO KNOW: )

Well most recent crashes seemed to be related to  http url calls during  
a period  when our internet connection was
really bad. Our cable modem here was running with a 36% packet loss for 
a few days until Ocean Time  Warner  fixed  it  today.

but it meant that downloaded files  were ending up incomplete, or 
corrupt,  even though an actual
file was downloaded  and  sitting on disk with the right  file name but 
probably with no valid eof.

One recipe  for  sure is: I'm getting  unexpectedly quit from
altSplash in a standalone app which is trying check  to see if it has a
copy of a stack file it needs already on disk. If it does, then it 
doesn't need
to  go get a new one from the server, but if the one on disk is corrupt
altSplash is crashing Rev.  I manually deleted the files it's supposed to 
be looking for, and re-ran it. Now it works. "Oh, you don't have the stack
files you need, I'll go  get them again from the web server."

What makes me nervous is not so much that things can go wrong... that's 
to be expected.
But there's no way for  the user recover in some of  these  situations. 
So, yes, I know
where the files are but in a "public" distribution, all that user is 
going to experience is
crash, with no way to recover. He  doesn't know that if he digs into his 
application
support and into this other folder he can find some stacks he  needs to 
delete.

Of  course it means we might need  to build in a little  more error 
checking,
perhaps a checksum() on some stack files  and  if  it's not in a reasonable
range, then  assume the  files are corrupt and delete  them and get 
fresh copies.
I need to do better at logging the  context and  scenarios.
Frankly this kind of thing is a bit over my head...

If Rev actually crashes, there's no way to trap with "catch"
and do anything intelligent, no mechanism to get a user  to send us a report
or tell them how to fix it. The UI is gone, Kaput!  No way to click on 
"Support" and
send  us anything....that's scary. They would have to be
aggressive  enough to want to solve  the problem to go to our web  site
and then email  us from there. Very few users will do that.

ummmm.  This  could  all boil down to (tentative  guess)

go stack ("~/Library/Preferences/HTDigital/" & "someCorruptStack.rev")

causes Rev to crash?  guess is should be possible  to test that if one
"contrived" a corrupt stack file...maybe open in BBEdit and  hack it up 
and save?

Sivakatirswami



Ken Ray wrote:
> On 8/29/06 5:43 PM, "Sivakatirswami" <katir at hindu.org> wrote:
>
>   
>> I'm getting more crashes under 2.7.3 than
>> I've had in past years with Revolution.
>>     
>
> What crashes are you getting, and what do you think is triggering them?
>
>
> Ken Ray
> Sons of Thunder Software
> Web site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/
> Email: kray at sonsothunder.com
>
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