Re: [Gretl-users] [Gretl-devel] gretl 1.8.5?
On Fri, 2 Oct 2009, Allin Cottrell wrote:
I'm thinking that we have now accumulated enough bug fixes (and
incremental feature improvements) to warrant releasing gretl
1.8.5. Probably best to do so before we're tempted to embark on
any major projects that might break things for a while.
To that end I've updated gretl.pot, so it's ready for translation
updates.
Any comments, not-yet-reported bugs that people want to see fixed
first?
Last week I taught a summer school where all the students were asked to
use gretl; all of them but two were using windows. I was absolutely
astonished by the fact that, from time to time, the gui client would crash
and they'd just go "oh, well", and start their work again. I'd ask
"what
were you doing when gretl crashed?" and, in most cases, only got vague
answers. (Footnote: a very annoying feature of point-n-click software is
that some bugs are _way_ more difficult to reproduce and hence to fix).
Of course gretl should never crash, but Allin has always done everything
humanly possible to prevent this (although the fact that development takes
place on linux doesn't help) doing his stellar job as per usual. The
essential ingredient we lack in these cases is bug reports.
I understand that the average windows user doesn't even consider the idea
of filing a bug report. This happens for a number of reasons I won't delve
into, but please please pretty please people, if gretl ever crashes on
you, you can do yourselves, the developers and the community at large a
big favour:
1) Spend some time to isolate the exact action that makes gretl crash.
That is, try to make gretl crash again by re-doing your actions.
2a) If you find a way to trigger a crash, that's excellent. Tell it to the
list. It usually takes AC days if not hours to fix these things.
2b) If you _don't_ find a way to reproduce the crash consistently, well
tell us all the same! User-interface crashes can be very elusive, and may
depend on a number of things, but just delimiting the search (like, for
example "I was writing a script" or "I was estimating an ARIMA model")
may
help a lot.
Remember guys, when you use gretl you get a good econometrics package for
free. Of course, no-one _expects_ you to pay anything back, but just
filing a bug report is an excellent way to contribute to the project,
much more important than most people realise.
Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Economia
Università Politecnica delle Marche
r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it
http://www.econ.univpm.it/lucchetti