How to debug for reporting

Introduction

As explained in "How to file a bug report", when you have searched through the bugs database and found out that your bug had not yet been reported, it will be usefull to try to reproduce the bug, and to find out what is the simplest situation where it happens. This will help the developper to get a grip on the bug.

When your bug can be reproduced, then you will be able to attach to its report a backtrace from a debugger.

This Howto tells you how to get these informations.

On Linux

If the crash happens on a Linux machine (or generally on a unix machine with the GNU gcc compiler) you can use gdb.

You have to first load scribus in a new gdb session and launch scribus from there. After scribus has crashed you automatically get some details about the error occured. You can get a full report with the command bt (backtrace).

$ gdb scribus
(gdb) run
... error reporting ...
(gdb) bt
... full backtracking information
(gdb) exit
$

If you compile yourself scribus -- and you plan to report bugs -- you should enable the debugging at compile time:

• With Cmake (cmake; make; make install) , you should add -DWANT_DEBUG=1 to your cmake line, e.g.:

 cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/opt/scribus15svn -DWANT_DEBUG=1

On Microsoft Windows

I've not tried it, but this How-to explains how to run gdb under Microsoft Windows.

Can anybody try it out and, eventually, report here if it works?