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This question was quickly and quite undeservedly down-voted and closed as "not a real question" because a few power users interpreted "how can I track down where a seemingly random, hard to reproduce freeze occurs" as "what's wrong with the code that I didn't post."

This is just extremely irritating. The question was absolutely clear and is certainly answerable. In fact, by the time the question was closed it had an accepted answer that the OP had verified as solving his problem!

So, can we please get this question reopened? Keeping it closed discourages users with similar issues from looking at the question and answers, and sends the message that this is an ambiguous question, which it's not. The closure also sends the message that the only appropriate questions for Stack Overflow are questions with broken code attached, which is completely wrong.

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    Please note that an accepted answer in and of itself does not really have any correlation with the quality of the question or its suitability for SO. The boat question had an accepted answer too.
    – jscs
    Apr 21, 2013 at 22:06

2 Answers 2

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Yes, a post asking what methods and tools to use to debug a particular error is definitely a real question for SO.

I would say this isn't an exemplary question; the OP could have, for example, Googled "SIGSTOP Cocos2D" or similar and tried to find and include a little more information. It's easy for me to see why it collected a few downvotes, and caused an allergic reaction in some close voters. It could have been phrased a bit more carefully to be explicit about the fact that it was asking for technique rather than direct aid.

Also, as I noted above, an accepted answer is no defense of the question. The OP can select an answer that consists solely of "asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf" if he so chooses.

I can see this post being useful to future readers in a similar situation, though. A more in-depth answer might even be forthcoming; what typical sampling results might look like in this situation, and how to interpret them.

It's also kind of refreshing (as you imply) to see a question where the OP is trying to learn how to help himself rather than asking others to do the debugging.

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  • Not exemplary? In it's original form it's dreadful, but it can probably be saved. Apr 21, 2013 at 22:32
  • @dmckee: Well, I've edited it as much as I felt I could.
    – jscs
    Apr 21, 2013 at 22:33
-5

Here is the question, as it currently stands:

I recently I came across an error that I cannot understand. The game I'm developing just freezes at a certain random point -- it gets a SIGSTOP -- and I cannot find the reason. What can I do to find out where the error occurs?

This question is worthless. It contains no code, and it is therefore prettymuch impossible for us to figure out where the SIGSTOP occurs. Imagine someone asking you a similarly phrased question and ask yourself honestly whether or not you'd need a lot more detail.

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    I think the entire point of this question (this Meta question, not the SO question) is to show that the SO question has value if it's interpreted as "what is the way to approach a SIGSTOP error" rather than "how do I fix my specific SIGSTOP error."
    – Pops
    Apr 21, 2013 at 22:12
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    Uhg. I may, indeed, be about technique but it gives not the slightest indication that the user has thought about the problem, nor any indication of the OP's level of sophistication. Does {he,she,it} know what a debugger is? Has hir tried it? And so on. "How do I debug [ill-specified] situation" is not a good question without some detail. Whole books can be (and have been) written on the topic. Apr 21, 2013 at 22:31
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    So down-vote it then. As for your thought-exercise... If someone asked me a question like that, I'd tell them to get a core dump and then do some postmortem debugging (or whatever the iOS equivalent of that is) - I sure as hell wouldn't ask them to send me their code, as that's pretty much just begging them to make their problem your problem. Now, if they came back and said they'd found the section where it was getting wedged and still couldn't figure it out, then I'd ask for the relevant code.
    – Shog9
    Apr 21, 2013 at 23:28

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