Reporting a bug may help you by bringing a solution to your problem, or it may
not. But in any case the principal function of a bug report is to help the
entire community by making the next version of <>as work better.
Bug reports are your contribution to the maintenance of <>as.
In order for a bug report to serve its purpose, you must include the
information that enables us to fix the bug.
- If the assembler gets a fatal signal, for any input whatever, that is a
<>as bug. Reliable assemblers never crash.
- If <>as produces an error message for valid input, that is a bug.
- If <>as does not produce an error message for invalid input, that
is a bug. However, you should note that your idea of “invalid input” might
be our idea of “an extension” or “support for traditional practice”.
- If you are an experienced user of assemblers, your suggestions for improvement
of <>as are welcome in any case.
How to Report Bugs
A number of companies and individuals offer support for gnu products. If
you obtained <>as 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 send bug reports for <>as
to `<>[email protected]'.
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 a symbol 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 assembler 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 if
it is new to us. Therefore, always write your bug reports on the assumption
that the bug has not been reported previously.
Sometimes people give a few sketchy facts and ask, “Does this ring a
bell?” This cannot help us fix a bug, so it is basically useless. We
respond by asking for enough details to enable us to investigate.
You might as well expedite matters by sending them to begin with.
To enable us to fix the bug, you should include all these things:
- The version of <>as. <>as announces it if you start
it with the `<>--version' argument.
Without this, we will not know whether there is any point in looking for
the bug in the current version of <>as.
- Any patches you may have applied to the <>as source.
- The type of machine you are using, and the operating system name and
version number.
- What compiler (and its version) was used to compile <>as—e.g.
“
gcc-2.7”.
- The command arguments you gave the assembler to assemble your example and
observe the bug. 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 file that will reproduce the bug. If the bug is observed when
the assembler is invoked via a compiler, send the assembler source, not the
high level language source. Most compilers will produce the assembler source
when run with the `<>-S' option. If you are using
gcc, use
the options `<>-v --save-temps'; this will save the assembler source in a
file with an extension of <>.s, and also show you exactly how
<>as is being run.
- 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 <>as 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
<>as 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.
- If you wish to suggest changes to the <>as source, send us context
diffs, as generated by
diff with the `<>-u', `<>-c', or `<>-p'
option. Always send diffs from the old file to the new file. If you even
discuss something in the <>as 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 <>as 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.