gtg-user team mailing list archive

[Bryce Harrington <bryce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 04:29:28PM -0400, Pablo Olmos de Aguilera C. wrote:
> Hi! I have a problem now with gtg and it is that is crashing at start
> -I think- everytime giving an error like this:

Hi Pablo, welcome to the gtg list.  :-)
 
> $ gtg
> Error parsing XML file
> /home/arch/.local/share/gtg/longaplhanumericstring.xml: no element
> found: line 1, column 0
> 
> Of course, the file is zero bytes and the .bak is there, so I rename
> it and everything backs to normal until I shutdown the laptop. I've a

Right, that error message basically just means that for some reason the
.xml file was zero'd out.

> feeling that this happens when I don't manually close gtg (of course I
> don't, it'd be SO tedious to do it for every application), but I'm not
> sure.

You could be right, I've seen something like that myself when gtg
terminated abnormally.  I never could reproduce the situation
deliberately so don't know exactly what conditions led to it.  I gather
that gtg gets in the middle of updating that .xml file but is closed
before it has a chance to flush the file cache out to disk.

You could check recent bug reports, I seem to recall one about this (or
a similar issue) about a week or so ago.

> The question really is... how should I diagnose the problem so I can
> file a bug (if applicable)? Should I ran gtg always in debug mode
> logging everything that happens or should I check somewhere else?

Well, as a general rule, when debugging any desktop application having
exact steps and conditions to reproduce the error is vital.  If you can
describe a problem well enough to enable a developer to reproduce a bug,
that's like getting it halfway towards solving it.

If you're curious about more advice on effective bug reporting, see the
post I wrote to my blog a couple months ago on 'Defect Reports'.

Bryce