Debugging Information

Sometimes there are behaviors or bugs that you can reliably reproduce but we cannot. In these instances it is often helpful to have a "full debug.out" which contains all of the keystrokes you pressed, the accessibility events that were emitted, what was spoken and brailled as a result, and any errors that may have occurred.

Obtaining a "full debug.out"

There are different debugging levels and different options/strategies for obtaining a full debug.out. We should outline them all here. For now, however, here's one approach:

In your ~/.orca/user-settings.py file, uncomment the following three lines by removing the initial # characters:

orca.debug.debugLevel = orca.debug.LEVEL_ALL

orca.debug.eventDebugLevel = orca.debug.LEVEL_OFF

orca.debug.debugFile = open(time.strftime('debug-%Y-%m-%d-%H:%M:%S.out'), 'w', 0)

Quit Orca. Then relaunch it (and any offending applications), reproduce the problem, and quit Orca. This will cause the debugging output to be in a file in your home directory (or wherever you launched Orca from if you manually launch it). The file's name will begin with "debug" end with ".out" and have a time stamp in between. Now re-comment the lines above so that Orca will no longer be recording all of that debugging information. When you relaunch Orca the next time, things should be back to normal.

Note that if you use Orca in order to recomment the lines, you will have two debug.outs (the first from reproducing the problem; the second from recommenting the lines). We of course need the first of the two. Because this file is likely quite large, bzipping or gzipping it is appreciated.

Thanks!