How to debug for reporting

Introduction

When you fill a bug about a crash, most of the time it is very helpfull, if you can attach 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 informations
(gdb) exit
$

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

• if you use the autotools (configure; make; make install) you can do it at configure time: $configure --enable-debug

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

 cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/opt/scribus134cvs -DWANT_CAIRO=1 -DWANT_DEBUG=1