Copy Kicad Version Info to the Clipboard

Would an entry in the Help menu be acceptable instead of a button in the about box? The problem with adding a button to the about box is that OSX and GTK have their own standard about dialog which makes adding a custom control the the dialog problematic. We would likely have to write our own custom about dialog instead of using the platform specific version to support this. To answer your question, yes having a way to copy the version information to the clipboard would be useful assuming that the person filing the bug report actually includes it in the report. That may be a much larger issue. It certainly would be helpful to developers to have all the necessary version information on bug reports.

I think even more usefull would if KiCad applications can create a (text) bug report (where possible) like most applications do. But sometimes it is difficult to catch some bugs. Also the about dialog class of wxWidgets is broken for OSX which leads to segfaults of all applications. I don't know yet how to fix this and disabled it for now. And maybe we could create our own class/window for about because it is different on all platforms (lack from the wxWidgets developers I think), the about dialog under windows used from wxWidgets is real ugly.

As a workaround for doing a homebrew About box maybe you could simply add an entry to the Help menu that just copies the relevant text to the clipboard. Or is the real problem that the required information is awkward to recover programatically (short of hardcoding it in every release)?

I have written crash interception and reporting software for Windows apps, and I've found its reports very useful. It reports the OS version, the module name and version, the location of the fault, and the call stack. I would be happy to make it available to the kicad project. Other OSs have different mechanisms, but the interception code is written in such a way that alternative intercept mechanisms could (probably) be coded in using compiler directives. The Windows crash interceptor was a horrible thing to code, but I made installing it into an app easy.

I just committed code (testing branch BZR version 2457) to add a help menu entry to all of the Kicad applications to copy most of the required information to the clipboard to help when filing bug reports. I hope this helps to answer your question and makes life a bit easier for both users and developers.

Wayne Stambaugh suggests this article as an answer to your question:
FAQ #1108: “How do I file a bug report?”.

Many thanks - that should be useful.