With the sucess of last week's bugtestfest, I am now hereby inagurating a new event that takes place sometime durring the weekend, basically when it is most convenient for me and other people, but otherwise on Saturday nights.
Our objective is twofold. One, we go through the list of unresolved bugs in the bugtracker and see if we can add more information to them, especially ones that say "please test". Two, if we find more bugs, we post them.
Our requirements are simple. All we need are at least three people, preferably a half dozen or so, and occationally a lot, that can compile odamex on their own, run it against gdb, and are able to follow my agenda (i.e., not expect to be entertained, but instead actually follow along with what I'm trying to test). Why three? Because in my experience, more players tends to bring the bugs to the forfront.
So, how do you compile odamex? Simple, check the
wiki for instructions. How do you run gdb against odamex? Simply grab gdb for your platform, stick it in your odamex directory, run
gdb odamex at the command line, then type
start (and then
continue if it hits a breakpoint before loading completely). Then, if the program crashes, you need to type in
bt at the prompt, paste the output in the
pastebin and then copy the URL of the pasted backtrace into #odamex so we can discuss it further or perhaps even add a bug report pertaining to it. And keep gdb open until someone says you can just restart the program, just in case a developer wants you to run more gdb commands to help pinpoint the problem.
Note that this is not encouraging all bugtesting to take place one day a week. Really, I'm starting this so people can learn how to compile and run odamex against gdb, and hopefully get more people doing bug testing at all other times durring the week. The bugtracker has become stale, filled to the brim with tons of bugs that haven't had any followup. It's time we change that.
