Support & Advice
If you think you've found a bug in Mesquite, our would like to
suggest a feature, please read this page. For help in using Mesquite,
see the Help page.
Why doesn't Mesquite do <insert your favorite
calculation here>?
Mesquite is extensible. What it can do now is a small part of
what we envisage. We're aware of many things that could be added.
The biggest needs we feel at the moment are for likelihood calculations
and more tools for examining character correlations.
We would welcome your suggestions at 
.
Of course, if you really want a new feature sooner than we can
add it, you are welcome to write your own module to implement
the feature. Contact us at 
or see the Mesquite website for information on development.
Why does <insert feature> not seem
to work properly?
If you think you have found a bug in
Mesquite, please report it to
us (see below). If we don't know
about a bug, it is unlikely that it will be fixed. It
might be natural to presume that we know about all the
bugs in Mesquite, but it is not possible for us to have
tried out every combination of options on every computer
environment with every data matrix, model, etc. If you
are not sure if it is a bug (a large number of users blame
themselves when they encounter a bug, presuming it is
something they have done wrong), please report it anyway.
Even if your apparent "bug" is a mistake you made,
your mistake might indicate a poorly designed interface
that should be corrected.
That there will be bugs in Mesquite is inevitable. Mesquite
is a large project, about 1500 pages of source code when
printed single spaced at 7 point font (about 120,000 or
more lines of source; over 5MB of ASCII text). We don't
have a big team of people working on it; it was initially
written by a single person, and now most of it
is written by only two people. We apologize for
the bugs that remain, and look forward to your bug reports
and efforts to aid us make Mesquite useful.
Mesquite is intended to become a community effort. Source
code is available at
the Mesquite web
site; we hope other programmers will help us improve
the system.
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Check out the Help system first
Mesquite doesn't have conventional documentation for all of its
features, but it does have various features to help you learn
how to use it. Check out the help page
for instructions. Also, browse through the example files, as they
contain many explanations and hints.
We recognize that Mesquite is a complex system that offers many
choices to the user. We plan to build macros and other tools to
help build paradigmatic analyses for users who don't want to sort
their way through options every time. However, they're only beginning
to be built.
Reporting bugs and requesting
advice
Please report bugs to .
Some bugs you may encounter will be bugs not in Mesquite but in
the operating system or Java virtual machine (for example, see
this list).
Partly to foster a community of users, and partly for efficiency,
we are encouraging users to sign up to a Mesquite
mailing list via which they can post queries about using Mesquite.
Once you've signed up, you can send a message to the list.
If you're reporting a bug, it's important that you are able to
specify, as precisely as possible, exactly what you did that generated
the bug. Try to find a precisely repeatable series of actions
that generate the bug. In any bug report, please specify the version
of Mesquite and any important modules and your operating system.
Be prepared to send us your data file so we can test the problem.
It is also very helpful to send us the Mesquite_Log
file that is in Mesquite_Support_Files (which is in your home
directory in Mac OS X and in "Documents and Settings\yourUserName\"
in Windows). We need a copy of the log file as it was written
immediately after your problem occurs.
(Of course, we recognize that some messages may be more appropriately
directed directly to us. You may contact us at .
Java bugs that affect Mesquite
Below are problems in Java on various operating systems that
affect Mesquite. If these problems annoy you, please contact those
responsible for your Java virtual machine.
MacOS X
The recommended configuration for Mesquite on Mac OS X is OS
X 10.5 or 10.6 with the latest Java. There are various
screen redraw and crashing bugs in earlier versions of OS X and
Java.
If at any point Mesquite quits spontaneously and OS X puts up
a dialog that says that Mesquite has unexpectedly quit, this is
what is called a "JVM crash". Technically it is not
supposed to be possible for Mesquite to do this, and thus it represents
a bug in Java and not a bug in Mesquite. Nonetheless, we would
like to know about it, because we may be able to find a way to
avoid the JVM bug.
MacOS X running Java 1.3.1
Mesquite 2 does not run under Java 1.3 or earlier.
MacOS X 10.0 through 10.2
We have not tested Mesquite 2 under these earlier versions
of MacOS X.
Mac OS 9
Mesquite 2 does not function on Mac OS 9, because it requires
Java 1.4.
Windows
- Windows bounce up and down as menus change (a rapid shrink
& expansion). This is due to a design flaw either in Windows
or the Java VM; there is nothing we can do about it.
- When you try to start Mesquite, you get a message that says it can't find Java. The JAVA_HOME may not be set properly on your machine To set it, go to System Properties (right click on My Computer and select Properties); Advanced tab; Environment Variables; look for Java_Home in the System variables window and edit it so that it points to the correct location of the latest Java installation.
Linux/Unix etc
- Window sizes and placements sometimes are inappropriate under
some window managers. Some window managers refuse to let Mesquite
have control over window size and placement, and choose what
appear to be random sizes and placements of windows. This is
not in our control. Try changing your window manager. We have
found that the default installations for KDE and Gnome of Red
Hat 7 work well with Mesquite.
- Messages about Fonts not found on startup may be given. The
problem is that you need to install a supposedly optional package
of fonts in order that the default installation of Sun's Java
VM work properly (see http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.2/changes.html#sunw).
We would have thought that if the default installation of a
product claims to support a program but doesn't, then that would
be considered a bug. Sun considered this to be not a bug, although
they seem to have fixed it...
