Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.The number of support requests we get is large, and they often end up being the same sort of thing but require a lot of work with the poster to figure out the problem.
Is there a way we could streamline this process by creating a diagnostics module -- eg check the content type is correctly defined in the DB, check file folders exist and are writable, etc?
Or would asking users to run simpletest be as good?
Comments
Comment #1
sunThat's already on my (admittedly very long) todo list:
http://drupal.org/project/debug
Wanna chime in? :)
The idea is: All modules under "my control" will add a dependency on Debug module when it is ready. I'm sick of asking users about their platform, browser, browser version, PHP version, PHP extensions, Drupal, other installed modules, and any other information that may be relevant for a module. Dries doesn't want it in core, so I'll add it to "sub-core".
Comment #2
joachim commentedHehe... good plan :)
I don't know about making it compulsory just to run the module though... definitely tell users to install it and paste in the report before we tackle their support requests, but I don't think it's fair to expect people to run it on their live sites all the time.
Comment #3
sunWell, the plan is to make that module "cheap", i.e. a really tiny .module, all functionality in an include file.
Because, the showstopper is: If it is optional, then our questions in support requests and bug reports still remain, they are just different: "Please install Debug module and attach a debug report here."
The idea is to cut down the time support requests and bug reports are open and make "wild guesses" obsolete by allowing users to provide all usually required information in the first place.
Comment #4
joachim commentedIt's not really the cost of installing the module that bothers me.
It just seems impolite to insist a user installs something that they don't technically need before they can use our module. Thousands of sites use this module, a tiny proportion of those users actually use the issue queue.
On a practical level, I can image clients or bosses asking developers to hack the dependency out of the info file, which hampers maintainability of sites.
I am all for a strongly worded note on the issue submit form, such as here http://drupal.org/node/add/project-issue/cck, and using a stock response to issues filed without information from this module, but I don't think installing it should be compulsory.
Comment #5
sunI'll think about it once more. Though I have yet to see a project or issue queue where users actually follow those instructions...
Now that I read CCK's instructions, I realized that Debug could automatically check whether any module updates are remaining (i.e. output current schema version if a module is not up to date).
btw, another idea was to put it into admin_menu... ;)
So. What would we like to report?
- memory limit
- max execution time
- image toolkit
- image file path
- image presets (including configuration?)
- ...?
Comment #6
Hetta commented- mysql version
- php version
- private / public files
- ...
Comment #7
sunNot going to happen for Image module anymore, thus moving to Debug project.