
How to Use the Mailing Lists
Read This! |
General Advice |
Version and Platform Info |
Build Problems |
Non-fatal bugs |
Fatal bugs
This page explains how to use the wxWidgets mailing lists efficiently.
Although you may choose to not follow these guidelines, please don't be
surprised if you get no answers to your question in this case. In particular,
although several wxWidgets developers usually reply to the questions on the
mailing list all of them have by now an almost-unconditional instinct to
delete the messages not conforming to these guidelines without reading them.
In short, following these simple guidelines makes life much simpler for both
the users and the developers. Not doing it can result in a very frustrating
experience. Please
do read this page carefully!
Please read the wxWidgets documentation (manual, install.txt,
FAQ) and search
wx-users archive,
before posting.
If you don't find an answer to your question and decide to post, please
try to give a specific, meaningful subject line to your posts so people
subscribing to 381 other mailing lists can pick them out easily, and to help
indexing and archiving. The subject line must be descriptive which something
like "I get ERRORS, HELP!!!!" (real life example of a message from my
mailbox from today) is not.
When writing the body of your message, please
- Ensure that you're using plain text, not HTML
- Set your word wrap to 75 or less
- Use English as correct as possible and, at the very least, use
English and not some other language
- Avoid multiple (more than 2, anyhow) exclamation or interrogation
marks -- this simply gives bad impression about you without conveying
any other information
Please don't post (big) attachments to the mailing list. If you have something
to show (a screenshot in general), please put it on the web somewhere and post
a link. Remember, the bandwidth does count.
Generally, please ask your questions in a
smart way.
Many, if not all, of the advices there are applicable to wxWidgets mailing lists.
So to summarize, the more you help other people, the more they
are likely to help you. Personally if I can't answer a
question in a couple of minutes or less -- due to the need to
shuffle someone's bunch of attached files or whatever -- I often ignore it, and
I'm sure I'm not the only one to filter messages in this way.
Thank you!
A question or bug report without version and platform information is useless.
Unless our crystal ball is in an exceptionally good working state on the day
of your posting, we generally have no idea what are you speaking about.
So please ALWAYS mention your platform (this includes the architecture
and the compiler used for building wxWidgets) and wxWidgets version. If you
are using an svn version, please specify the
revision you use (it can be seen in svn up output or queried using
svnversion command). You may either mention it in the subject, like this:
[2.8.11, platform, compiler] subject
^ ^ ^
| | +--- e.g. BC 5.0, VC 7.1, etc.
| +------------ e.g. WinXP, GTK+ 2, X11, etc.
+---------------------- 2.9.0, svn trunk from some date, ...
or inside the message body with a section like this:
WX : 2.8.11
OS : Windows 7
COMPILER: VC9 (mention whether you use IDE or makefile)
Please make sure to mention any non-standard options you used. For example, any
modifications to
wx/setup.h for Windows builds or any non-default
configure options for Unix ones. Especially mention if you're using an STL
build and, for 2.8, if you're using Unicode version or ANSI one. For Unix
platforms the contents of
config.log file is often helpful for
diagnosing the problem.
Please don't send hundreds or thousands of lines of compiler or make output, as
you can certainly understand nobody is going to read them anyhow. Almost always
the first few errors, if not the first one, are enough. Please try to trim the
output before posting it. And, on a related note, please translate it to
English if your compiler gives errors in another language -- if we can't
understand your message, we can't help you (seems obvious, but somehow it
apparently isn't).
Generally it's much better to show a little bit of source with
the code that causes the problem, rather than sending an entire
program that people then have to sift through (nobody has time to do this
anyhow).
Unless this is exceptionally difficult to do, please try to reproduce your
problem in one of the samples (minimal one by default, another one may be more
suitable if it already contains some of the code you need to show the problem)
and send us just a diff which can be produced by svn diff command or
by saving the original file and running the diff utility
(with -bBu2 options) against it after your changes.
Don't send a message about a program crash if you haven't already
tried running it under a debugger to investigate the problem. If you did,
please send the relevant part of the stack trace (what functions the
crash happened in) for a crash-type bug. Do note that you must use a version
of wxWidgets built with the debug info for the crash to be at all useful.
And unless the reason for the crash is obvious from the provided stack trace,
please also provide a way of reproducing the problem using the instructions for
the non-fatal bugs above.