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How to Use the Mailing Lists
Read This! | General Advice | Version and Platform Info | Build Problems | Non-fatal bugs | Fatal bugs

Read This Before Posting...

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!

General Advice

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!

Version and Platform Information

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)

Build Problems

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).

Non Fatal Bugs

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.

Fatal Bugs

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.

 
 

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Site design and update scripts by Kevin Ollivier, with special thanks to Brad Anderson for his improvements to the sidebar, intro table and navbar designs, Bryan Petty for the new wxWidgets blocks graphics and logo text, and to the wxWidgets community for all their helpful suggestions, comments and testing!