Debugging with GDB: Bug Reporting

Debugging with GDB: Bug Reporting

31.2 How to Report Bugs

A number of companies and individuals offer support for GNU products. If you obtained GDB from a support organization, we recommend you contact that organization first.

You can find contact information for many support companies and individuals in the file etc/SERVICE in the GNU Emacs distribution.

In any event, we also recommend that you submit bug reports for GDB to http://bugzilla.ecoscentric.com/.

The fundamental principle of reporting bugs usefully is this: report all the facts. If you are not sure whether to state a fact or leave it out, state it!

Often people omit facts because they think they know what causes the problem and assume that some details do not matter. Thus, you might assume that the name of the variable you use in an example does not matter. Well, probably it does not, but one cannot be sure. Perhaps the bug is a stray memory reference which happens to fetch from the location where that name is stored in memory; perhaps, if the name were different, the contents of that location would fool the debugger into doing the right thing despite the bug. Play it safe and give a specific, complete example. That is the easiest thing for you to do, and the most helpful.

Keep in mind that the purpose of a bug report is to enable us to fix the bug. It may be that the bug has been reported previously, but neither you nor we can know that unless your bug report is complete and self-contained.

Sometimes people give a few sketchy facts and ask, “Does this ring a bell?” Those bug reports are useless, and we urge everyone to refuse to respond to them except to chide the sender to report bugs properly.

To enable us to fix the bug, you should include all these things:

The version of GDB. GDB announces it if you start with no arguments; you can also print it at any time using show version.
Without this, we will not know whether there is any point in looking for the bug in the current version of GDB.
The type of machine you are using, and the operating system name and version number.
The details of the GDB build-time configuration. GDB shows these details if you invoke it with the --configuration command-line option, or if you type show configuration at GDB’s prompt.
What compiler (and its version) was used to compile GDB—e.g. “gcc–2.8.1”.
What compiler (and its version) was used to compile the program you are debugging—e.g. “gcc–2.8.1”, or “HP92453-01 A.10.32.03 HP C Compiler”. For GCC, you can say gcc --version to get this information; for other compilers, see the documentation for those compilers.
The command arguments you gave the compiler to compile your example and observe the bug. For example, did you use ‘-O’? To guarantee you will not omit something important, list them all. A copy of the Makefile (or the output from make) is sufficient.
If we were to try to guess the arguments, we would probably guess wrong and then we might not encounter the bug.
A complete input script, and all necessary source files, that will reproduce the bug.
A description of what behavior you observe that you believe is incorrect. For example, “It gets a fatal signal.”
Of course, if the bug is that GDB gets a fatal signal, then we will certainly notice it. But if the bug is incorrect output, we might not notice unless it is glaringly wrong. You might as well not give us a chance to make a mistake.

Even if the problem you experience is a fatal signal, you should still say so explicitly. Suppose something strange is going on, such as, your copy of GDB is out of synch, or you have encountered a bug in the C library on your system. (This has happened!) Your copy might crash and ours would not. If you told us to expect a crash, then when ours fails to crash, we would know that the bug was not happening for us. If you had not told us to expect a crash, then we would not be able to draw any conclusion from our observations.

To collect all this information, you can use a session recording program such as script, which is available on many Unix systems. Just run your GDB session inside script and then include the typescript file with your bug report.

Another way to record a GDB session is to run GDB inside Emacs and then save the entire buffer to a file.
If you wish to suggest changes to the GDB source, send us context diffs. If you even discuss something in the GDB source, refer to it by context, not by line number.
The line numbers in our development sources will not match those in your sources. Your line numbers would convey no useful information to us.

Here are some things that are not necessary:

A description of the envelope of the bug.
Often people who encounter a bug spend a lot of time investigating which changes to the input file will make the bug go away and which changes will not affect it.

This is often time consuming and not very useful, because the way we will find the bug is by running a single example under the debugger with breakpoints, not by pure deduction from a series of examples. We recommend that you save your time for something else.

Of course, if you can find a simpler example to report instead of the original one, that is a convenience for us. Errors in the output will be easier to spot, running under the debugger will take less time, and so on.

However, simplification is not vital; if you do not want to do this, report the bug anyway and send us the entire test case you used.
A patch for the bug.
A patch for the bug does help us if it is a good one. But do not omit the necessary information, such as the test case, on the assumption that a patch is all we need. We might see problems with your patch and decide to fix the problem another way, or we might not understand it at all.

Sometimes with a program as complicated as GDB it is very hard to construct an example that will make the program follow a certain path through the code. If you do not send us the example, we will not be able to construct one, so we will not be able to verify that the bug is fixed.

And if we cannot understand what bug you are trying to fix, or why your patch should be an improvement, we will not install it. A test case will help us to understand.
A guess about what the bug is or what it depends on.
Such guesses are usually wrong. Even we cannot guess right about such things without first using the debugger to find the facts.