Reporting Bugs

[Kevin McGrattan <kevin.mcgrattan@nist.gov>]

All

Just a reminder about reporting bugs. It makes my life a
little easier when you
report the following info when you have encountered a bug:

At what point in the simulation the run crashed, and whether
the program ended
gracefully with a message about an instability occurring, or
whether you got an
undecipherable message from the operating system (the
contents of which are not
very useful to me).

What version of FDS you are using, and if it's our test
version fds2p2, what is 
the compilation date. This date appears at the start of the
diagnostic output that
usually scrolls on the screen. If you can capture the
diagnostic output file, that
is useful to me.

Send me the input file, with all the database entries
embedded within the input
file. I have dozens of these database files floating around.
I want to replicate
exactly what you are doing, so having all the info in one
file is helpful. Only
in cases involving sprinkler files should you include a
separate file.

I'm working on some bugs now involving scenarios in which
the geometry changes:
opening and closing doors, burning through commodity, etc.
These bugs usually are
due to numerical rather than physical causes because when
the geometry changes,
the arrays that store info about surface properties change,
and errors occur when
numbers are put into memory slots that no longer exist.

For those of you who encounter bugs of this sort, or any
bugs really, try using
the latest version of fds2p2 on the ftp site to see if the
bug is fixed before
sending me the bug report.

Thanks

Kevin



-- 
Kevin McGrattan
National Institute of Standards and Technology
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8663
Gaithersburg MD 20899-8663

Telephone: (301) 975 2712
FAX:       (301) 975 4052