Subject: Re: bug#4879: Crash in xmenu_show

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:03:28 +0200

> From: Juri Linkov <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Date: Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:10:27 +0200
> 
> > What does it mean, exactly?  Why didn't you send the report using "M-x
> > report-emacs-bug RET", where all this information is automatically
> > included?
> 
> `M-x report-emacs-bug RET' includes irrelevant information

OTOH, it includes some very relevant one - the exact way you
configured Emacs for the build, and the language environment in which
you invoked Emacs.  These are there for a reason, and if you don't
want to send the whole report for some reason, at least send these
parts of it.  How can we possibly educate users to use this facility
if the developers themselves don't?

> the date
> it inserts in the version string is the date of compilation that
> provides no help to reproduce the bug.  Is it possible to replace it
> with the date of the last CVS checkout/update that says exactly what
> state of the code repository contains the bug?

Everything's possible -- this is software.  You could write code that
looks in the ChangeLog files for the latest log entries in src/,
lisp/, and leim/, for example.  Or the code could look at the time
stamp of some CVS/Template file (in any directory) -- but this needs
to be changed for those who use VCs other than CVS, and for everybody
when we switch to bzr.

Personally, I never build without "cvs update", so the build time is
almost exactly the checkout time.