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About How to Use wxWidgets Mailing Lists
Read This! | General Advice | Version and Platform Info | 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 surprizied 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, if possible, the wx-users archive, before posting. Note that you may also use the news group search as wx-users mailing list is gatewayed to the comp.soft-sys.wxwindows USENET group.

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 crystall 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 the cvs, you should also mention the date (at elast approximately). You may either mention it in the subject, like this:

    [wx 2.4.1, platform, compiler] subject
     ^   ^         ^        ^
     |   |         |        +--- e.g. BC 5.0, VC 7.1, etc.
     |   |         +------------ e.g. WinXP, GTK+ 2, X11, etc.
     |   +---------------------- 2.4.0, cvs HEAD from some date, ...
     +-------------------------- prefix for wxWidgets mails

or inside the message body with a section like this:

WX      : 2.4.1
OS      : Windows XP
COMPILER: VC++.NET (mention whether you use IDE or makefile)

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).

Ideally, 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 cvs diff -bBu2 command or by saving the original file and running the diff utility (with the same -bBu2 options) against it after your changes.

Try not to send messages that complain about errors when they are in fact harmless warnings, such as the Borland C++ or Cygwin linker warnings. Although we wish to eliminate as many warnings as we can, some are just not worth the effort of eliminating, or they would cause us to change the API.

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.

If you are asked for the code to reproduce the bug, please read the section about the non-fatal bugs above.



 
 

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