A number of companies and individuals offer support for gnuproducts. If you obtained the binary utilities from a supportorganization, we recommend you contact that organization first.
You can find contact information for many support companies andindividuals in the file etc/SERVICE in the gnu Emacsdistribution.
In any event, we also recommend that you send bug reports for the binaryutilities to http://www.sourceware.org/bugzilla/.
The fundamental principle of reporting bugs usefully is this:report all the facts. If you are not sure whether to state afact or leave it out, state it!
Often people omit facts because they think they know what causes theproblem and assume that some details do not matter. Thus, you mightassume that the name of a file you use in an example does not matter. Well, probably it does not, but one cannot be sure. Perhaps the bug isa stray memory reference which happens to fetch from the location wherethat pathname is stored in memory; perhaps, if the pathname weredifferent, the contents of that location would fool the utility intodoing the right thing despite the bug. Play it safe and give aspecific, 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 ifit is new to us. Therefore, always write your bug reports on the assumptionthat the bug has not been reported previously.
Sometimes people give a few sketchy facts and ask, “Does this ring abell?” This cannot help us fix a bug, so it is basically useless. Werespond 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:
Without this, we will not know whether there is any point in looking forthe bug in the current version of the binary utilities.
BFD library.gcc-2.7”.If we were to try to guess the arguments, we would probably guess wrongand then we might not encounter the bug.
If the source files were produced exclusively using gnu programs(e.g., gcc, gas, and/or the gnu ld), then itmay be OK to send the source files rather than the object files. Inthis case, be sure to say exactly what version of gcc, orwhatever, was used to produce the object files. Also say howgcc, or whatever, was configured.
Of course, if the bug is that the utility gets a fatal signal, then wewill certainly notice it. But if the bug is incorrect output, we mightnot notice unless it is glaringly wrong. You might as well not give usa chance to make a mistake.
Even if the problem you experience is a fatal signal, you should stillsay so explicitly. Suppose something strange is going on, such as yourcopy of the utility is out of sync, or you have encountered a bug inthe C library on your system. (This has happened!) Your copy mightcrash and ours would not. If you told us to expect a crash, then whenours fails to crash, we would know that the bug was not happening forus. If you had not told us to expect a crash, then we would not be ableto draw any conclusion from our observations.
The line numbers in our development sources will not match those in yoursources. Your line numbers would convey no useful information to us.
Here are some things that are not necessary:
Often people who encounter a bug spend a lot of time investigatingwhich changes to the input file will make the bug go away and whichchanges will not affect it.
This is often time consuming and not very useful, because the way wewill find the bug is by running a single example under the debuggerwith 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 insteadof the original one, that is a convenience for us. Errors in theoutput will be easier to spot, running under the debugger will takeless 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 does help us if it is a good one. But do not omitthe necessary information, such as the test case, on the assumption thata patch is all we need. We might see problems with your patch and decideto fix the problem another way, or we might not understand it at all.
Sometimes with programs as complicated as the binary utilities it isvery hard to construct an example that will make the program follow acertain path through the code. If you do not send us the example, wewill not be able to construct one, so we will not be able to verify thatthe bug is fixed.
And if we cannot understand what bug you are trying to fix, or why yourpatch should be an improvement, we will not install it. A test case willhelp us to understand.
Such guesses are usually wrong. Even we cannot guess right about suchthings without first using the debugger to find the facts.
Corrections, suggestions, and new documentation should be posted to the Forum.
The text of the Arduino reference is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. Code samples in the reference are released into the public domain.