Since I am not a developer and have a hard time keeping up with the mailing lists, I'm going to post this here in the hope that someone who participates in both the forums and the mailing list can pass it along. I have been doing a fair amount of testing lately, trying to boot Haiku (from a USB flash drive) on a few systems and even installing it on those that I can. If I'm going to file bug reports, I'd really like to provide a snapshot of the system (hardware) I'm having an issue with along with any other information I can provide.
Pieter Panman's Devices application does a decent job of reporting the hardware that Haiku has identified but there is no easy way to write all that info to a file. I'm not sure but, I think a file containing the output from the Devices app might be quite usefull for the developers. Would it be possible to add a "Write Data to File" (Generate System Information?) item to the Devices menu before alpha 2 goes out the door? That way the devs could ask users to attach the file to the bug report and get a good idea of the hardware environment the bug is occurring in.
Since the data allready exists in the application, I'm thinking it would not be too difficult to just write it out to a text file. The format of the output file wouldn't be cast in stone and could evolve into a more stable form by teh time R1 final is ready. Of course, maybe I'm completely out of my depth here!
edit: It would have bee usefull for me to read the "Tips for a helpful bug report" link on the "Welcome" page before writing that there's no easy way to write the hardware info to a file. On that page, I learned about the listdev command whose output can be re-directed to a file by appending "> filename.txt" to the command. The point made above still stands in the case of people who are averse to typing commands in a terminal.
Alan
