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IMatch Bug Reports and Feature Requests => Bug Reports => Topic started by: Mario on May 29, 2013, 09:35:22 AM

Title: How to report bugs - good bug reports allow quick bug fixes
Post by: Mario on May 29, 2013, 09:35:22 AM
I can find and fix bugs and problems more quickly when I can reproduce them here in my office. It helps if you provide as much information as possible about the bug you have found. Use this list as a guide:
Finding and fixing problems in IMatch is very important. If you run into a problem, help me by sending me the info I need to reproduce, find and fix the problem.

How to produce a DUMP file when IMatch hangs

When IMatch stops responding, please wait a while, especially when you have triggered a computing-intensive operation like metadata write-back or data-driven category updates. If IMatch is still not responding after a minute or so, it may be stuck somewhere. To analysis this, please copy the log file and attach it ZIPped to a bug report.

A DUMP file will be very helpful because it shows me what IMatch is doing and hopefully also why it stopped responding.

To produce a DUMP file, please follow these instructions. (https://www.photools.com/community/index.php?topic=17.msg31)

Debug Logging

You can switch IMatch to debug logging under Help > Support > Debug Logging. This produces much more information in the log file and this may be very helpful when analyzing problems.

Bugs related to Metadata

For bugs related to reading or writing metadata, please do this:


ExifTool Command Processor

If you have problems reading or writing metadata, select a file with that problem in a File Window and then run the ExifTool Command Processor from the Tools menu.
Use the "List Metadata" preset and save the results to a text file: Select the output text in the right panel with Ctrl+A, then run Windows Notepad and paste the results. Then save in Notepad and attach that file to your community post. This helps massively with diagnosing problems.

Providing Sample Files

Usually a sample file which allows me to reproduce the specific problem is very helpful, e.g. when IMatch fails to read the metadata from a file, the results are not as expected or IMatch fails to write data to a file.

If the file is too large to attach to your bug report, please upload it to your cloud space (DropBox, OneDrive GoogleDrive, ...) and include a link to the file in your bug report post here.

A funny and competent treatment on How to Report Bugs Effectively (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html).