How to create good bug reports

[peteru]

Creating a good bug report is the first step to having a bug fixed quickly.

Generally bugs can be divided into two categories: crashing and unexpected behaviour.

In both cases the most important factor is describing what you did to get the bug to show up. Ideally, you will come up with a sequence of steps that anyone can follow to reproduce the bug. When you provide these instructions to reproduce a bug, please assume you are explaining this to someone who has not used a Beyonwiz before and only speaks very basic English. Assume, that when reproducing a bug, you start from watching TV and you need to explain to someone on the phone what buttons to push. For example:

• From live TV
• Press MENU
• Go to the right and select Information
• Select Network
• Press BLUE
• The results is a crash

(The above is contrived, but it should give you an idea as to what level of detail is useful)

If you get a crash, please attach the crash logs to your bug report. There is a very strong chance that someone will be able to fix the problem when they have a log and can reproduce the problem. To get the logs, all you need is to FTP to your Beyonwiz.

You can use your web browser to do this. Go to ftp://beyonwizt3/home/root/logs/ (if your DHCP server doesn't automatically add the host names to your DNS, you may need to use the IP address, such as 192.168.1.30, instead of beyonwizt3). For other models, use beyonwizt4, beyonwizv2, etc...

Login with the user name root, the default password is empty/blank for firmware versions prior to 17.5_20170706. From firmware 17.5_20170706 onwards, you will need to set the root password using SETUP/Network/Password in order to be able to connect with FTP.

You should see something like this:

Code: Select all

enigma2_crash_1398287422.log 	11 KB 	24/04/14 	07:10:00
enigma2_crash_1398287672.log 	11 KB 	24/04/14 	07:14:00

You can download the relevant log files and attach them to your bug reports. Please attach the logs as plain .txt files, do not zip or rar them.

If you have both a crash log and the steps required to reproduce the crash, then the likelihood of your problem being fixed soon is very high.

If your problem does not result in a crash, but instead exhibits unexpected behaviour or shows on screen warning or error messages, please provide detailed description of what you see. This includes the exact text of any messages, so that the relevant text can be located in the code. You may also want to use OpenWebif (the web browser interface) to take a screenshot to illustrate what happens.

Always include the exact version of the firmware you are running. This can be found in the About page.

Whenever you see mention of T3, you can substitute T2, T4, U4 or V2 as appropriate for your model.

[JasonBB]

Good post Peter,

Where do you send the crash logs?

[Gully]

Good post Peter,

Where do you send the crash logs?

Just create a new topic with a clear title and all the details and then attach the log to your post.

[Krusty]

Just create a new topic with a clear title and all the details and then attach the log to your post.

Hi Gully,

Where to post (which area or thread)? I have had seven so far in just a few hours & would like to submit them if they help!

[Gully]

Just create a new topic with a clear title and all the details and then attach the log to your post.

Hi Gully,

Where to post (which area or thread)? I have had seven so far in just a few hours & would like to submit them if they help!

How about this area? It is called Bug Reporting after all.

Just create a new topic, not this one, as I said.

[Gully]

Krusty I have moved your posts to a new topic as I said you should do in my last post.

They need a title describing the bug and step by step details of how to reproduce it so that the engineers can follow it. Please update your new topic with these.