Chapter 28. Reporting Bugs in gdb
289
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 conve-
nience 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.
Y
setfilename>rluser.info
Y
/setfilename>
Summary of Contents for ENTERPRISE LINUX 3 - SECURITY GUIDE
Page 1: ...Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Debugging with gdb ...
Page 12: ...2 Chapter 1 Debugging with gdb ...
Page 28: ...18 Chapter 4 Getting In and Out of gdb ...
Page 34: ...24 Chapter 5 gdb Commands ...
Page 44: ...34 Chapter 6 Running Programs Under gdb ...
Page 68: ...58 Chapter 8 Examining the Stack ...
Page 98: ...88 Chapter 10 Examining Data ...
Page 112: ...102 Chapter 12 Tracepoints ...
Page 118: ...108 Chapter 13 Debugging Programs That Use Overlays ...
Page 138: ...128 Chapter 14 Using gdb with Different Languages ...
Page 144: ...134 Chapter 15 Examining the Symbol Table ...
Page 170: ...160 Chapter 19 Debugging remote programs ...
Page 198: ...188 Chapter 21 Controlling gdb ...
Page 204: ...194 Chapter 22 Canned Sequences of Commands ...
Page 206: ...196 Chapter 23 Command Interpreters ...
Page 216: ...206 Chapter 25 Using gdb under gnu Emacs ...
Page 296: ...286 Chapter 27 gdb Annotations ...
Page 300: ...290 Chapter 28 Reporting Bugs in gdb ...
Page 322: ...312 Chapter 30 Using History Interactively ...
Page 362: ...352 Appendix D gdb Remote Serial Protocol ...
Page 380: ...370 Appendix F GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE ...
Page 386: ...376 Appendix G GNU Free Documentation License ...
Page 410: ......