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Reporting specific problems with Topographica

Topographica is used actively in research, and is thus continuously changing, which inevitably adds new problems as old ones are fixed and new features are added. When you have found what appears to be a problem with Topographica itself (whether a bug or a missing feature), please try the following:

  1. If you are using a version that is more than a few weeks old, consider trying the most up to date ("bleeding-edge") version via SVN. The code is updated nearly every day, so by the end of a few weeks many changes will have accumulated. Often, bugs will have been fixed and new features will have been added already in the SVN repository, even though they are not yet released officially.

  2. If the problem is still present in the current version, you can search the list of bug reports on our project pages at SourceForge to see if we already know about the problem. If you find the problem, please feel free to add additional comments to the report.

  3. We also have a task list, used by the developers to keep track of tasks. Try searching this list for information about your problem. If you find a related task, please send an e-mail to the developer listed as being in charge of that item (if any). If no one is yet listed as being responsible, feel free to volunteer!

  4. If you can locate where in the code there might be a problem (e.g. by going to the line numbers mentioned in a Python exception), you will often find a comment with the keyword "ALERT" beside the code. These notes are used to mark problems of which we are aware but have not yet been able to address. If so, please let us know that fixing the problem is urgent, and/or suggest fixes for the offending code.

  5. Otherwise, please file a bug report. If possible, please include:

    • the full error message, if any
    • if you are not using SVN (i.e. you downloaded a released version), please include the Topographica release number (you can obtain this by starting Topographica and typing topo.release)
    • if you are using SVN, please include the output of svn diff, svn status, and svn info; you can create a single file (report) containing this information with the following command: 
      svn info > report; svn status >> report; svn diff >> report
    • which operating system you are using (Linux, Mac, or Windows)
    • any additional file needed to replicate the problem (e.g. a script you're using)
    • a specific recipe (list of steps) that can reproduce the problem

    To maximize the speed of resolution, please make sure that your problem can be replicated using an unmodified copy of Topographica (either released or from SVN), and try to have a small, clear, quick-to-run example of the problem. Any bug report is better than none, so in any case please do send it in even if you can't satisfy the above requests. Even so, the clearer and simpler it is, the quicker we will be able to address the problem.

  6. If you get no reply after a few days, you can try emailing Jim directly, in case there was some problem with the email notification from the bug report system. But it's much more effective to use the bug report system, which automatically delivers the appropriate messages to the appropriate developers.

Hosted by: SourceForge Logo James A. Bednar (jbednar@inf.ed.ac.uk) Last update: Thu Sep 4 0:54:23 BST 2008.