Field

Reporting a Bug

Field has bugs. Lots of them. Join us in finding them and squashing them.

Firstly, you can see the ones that we know about here. If you find something wrong with Field, or even think that you've found something wrong with Field, take a brief look over this list and try the search box in the bottom right hand corner of this site. Maybe we've seen it before. Maybe we've seen it before but need a nice reproducible version of it. Maybe we've already fixed it.

If none of these things are true, then maybe you've found a new one. To file a new bug report, you need a user name and password on this site. Email field 'at' openendedgroup.com with a username and password of your choosing to get one. You then go here once you have logged in (subliminal bottom left button). You might also drop an email to the field-development to start a discussion around the bug.

What makes a good bug report? We like:

  • enough information that we can make the bug happen on our machines here.
  • enough information that we can start thinking about the bug before we try to reproduce it.
  • to be talking about the latest version of Field — the latest beta or even better the dev tree.

If what you report feels genuinely bugish, then the next three questions will inevitably be:

  • What hardware and OS are you running on — include the graphics hardware you have. You can find this from "About This Mac" -> "More information".
  • What Field plugins do you have installed?
  • What error messages are given in the Terminal / Console if you run Field from the command line? Just include the whole damn mess of debug ouput. Zipped it doesn't take much space.

Since these questions are inevitable, if you think you've found a bug, you should just skip us asking them and include their answer in the bug report.

To run a beta Field from the command line, open Terminal and type /Applications/field.app/Contents/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub and hit return. Do what ever you do to get that bug to happen, copy and paste all the text in the terminal window into TextEdit and save it out. Attach it to the bug report.

And finally, we'd much rather have a bug report that turns out to be a misunderstanding than no bug report at all. Misunderstandings are largely our fault — we write the documentation as well.