by Hooray » Tue Jan 08, 2019 1:12 am
Yes, if possible, please always include at the very least a flight plan so that the portion of the flight can be reproduced more easily.
By the way, that's also an excellent way for people to easily test if an issue is specific to a certain aircraft or environmental setting (especially in conjunction with increased simulation time).
Originally, we were using pre-recorded flights to stress-test fgfs and try to reproduce certain issues, then Instant replay got added, and meanwhile there is the "flight recorder" subsystem.
When it comes to troubleshooting, it really makes sense to use these features.
Note that if people generally shared such flights, it would be possible to grow a library of flights (plans) and in theory they could be executed automatically in a scripted fashion on some build server (think jenkins), e.g. in a headless fashion running inside a gdb session with an increased simulation rate, for troubleshooting purposes.
Over time, something like this could become a huge asset (think regression testing), not just referring to bugs, but also to performance troubleshooting (profiling) - imagine being able to gather the memory requirements for the same flight (plan) using different fgfs versions, or the frame rate/spacing.
In other words, it would be an excellent idea for people to always create, provide and share such flights when making bug reports - likewise, it would be an excellent idea for core developers to commit such files to /some/ repository so that we can use them in the future for regression testing purposes.