Misc Stuff

I’m currently working on a new, more minimalist design for my website. It’s not finished yet, but you can preview it here.

I actually did a little hacking on Xfmedia earlier this week. Unfortunately I find myself forgetting fine details of the direction I wanted to take with the reorg, so I feel like it’ll be a while before I really jump into it hardcore again. On the other hand, I’m having second thoughts about parts of that document, so maybe it’s a good thing that I’m re-evaluating and possibly redesigning some portions.

I attempted to update Xfce Bugzilla to 2.22.0 yesterday, but running checksetup.pl failed with some weird error about the parameter ‘languages’ not existing. I messed with it for a little while, but ended up downgrading back to the latest stable in the 2.20 series.

I’m also working on a Xfce debugging guide for people with crashes or unexplained behavior who want to help out. I’m seriously getting tired of answering the same “how do I get a backtrace?” questions. I’m also tired of people posting straces in bug reports. While an strace might be the easiest thing to get, and it may look impressive in the amount of output it generates, in my experience it’s useless in fixing most crash bugs. A stack dump at the crash from the debugger is really the best way to go. Bonus points if it’s done on a debug build with symbols unstripped and no compiler optimisations. Double bonus points if the supporting libraries have debugging information too.

Anyway, this guide isn’t finished yet, but I’d appreciate some feedback. Already I see it’s gotten way too wordy and long. Probably some parts of it should be broken down into concrete steps instead of paragraphs, and maybe it should be separated out into two separate guides, one being more of a FAQ to help figure out what part of Xfce crashed, and the other more of a generic how-to on gdb. Not sure yet. As I said, comments (either here or via email) are appreciated.