exception handling, bug reporting

Then when an error occurs, try to only ask the user questions you can't answer programatically. Ideally, your exception handling should already track their current action (saving an invoice), current context (invoice screen), the entity being acted upon(invoice #10013), and all the exception info from the program. If you can't capture this and retrieve it remotely, feed it to your web form (in URL params or whatever) when the user clicks 'report this issue'. Ensure you pay attention to any sensitive data requirements.

Then you should only need to ask your users the human questions like - 'How can we best contact you about this issue?' (method / times / etc.), and give them an idea of how long it'll take for them to get a response from a human.

What is the best way to cater for users reporting bugs ? - Stack Overflow

Blogged with the Flock Browser

SVN, Git

AMO = addons.mozilla.org team...

Moving away from SVN

We moved AMO into SVN in 2006 and it’s treated us relatively well. Somewhere along the line, we decided to tag our production versions at a revision of trunk instead of keeping a separate tag and merging changes into it. It’s worked for us but it’s a hard cutoff on code changes, which means that while we’re in a code freeze no one can check anything in to trunk. As we begin to branch for larger projects this will become more of a hassle, so I’m planning on going back to a system where a production tag is created and changes are merged into it as they are ready to go live.

Most of the development team has been using git-svn for several months and, aside from the commands being far more verbose, we haven’t had many complaints. We’ve discovered Git is a much more powerful development tool and we expect to use it directly starting some time next year. As of now, we expect to maintain the /locales/ directory in SVN so this change doesn’t affect localizers but we’ll keep people notified if there are any changes to that process.

All Night Diner : AMO Development Changes in 2010

so... should we consider Git instead of SVN?

production tag and merging stuff in when stable sounds like a nice process...

Blogged with the Flock Browser