Provide a debug version to nail down error faster

[Guenther Erhard]

Hi Scott,

As pointed out in another thread I might be a good idea to compile a special debug version of PW. Often PW causes a reset or some other misbehaviour without giving a clue what was the reason.

I'm the author of Vocabulary Cards, a freeware flashcard program for PalmOS. Most of my users work with the newest beta version which has of course sometimes a bug or two. To make it easier for my to nail down such bugs I implemented some debug routines to log the last 50 function calls. In case of an error (e.g. a return value is not correct) the program does not just throw out SysFatalAlert, but writes the current database information, important preferences settings and the function calls (incl. code position) to a memo. The user can mail this memo to me. With the information in this memo I can narrow down the possible cause. It has reduced my bug fixing time significantly.

The debug system causes an overhead of maybe 5-10%, which is acceptable for a test version.

What is your opinion? If interested I can support you.

Thanks,
Guenther