Chapter 6. Finding and Reporting Bugs

6.1. How To Report A Bug

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(Extracted from wine/documentation/bugreports)

There are two ways for you to make a bug report. One uses a simple perl script, and is recommended if you don't want to spend a lot of time producing the report. It is designed for use by just about anyone, from the newest of newbies to advanced developers. You can also make a bug report the hard way -- advanced developers will probably prefer this.

6.1.2. The Hard Way

Some simple advice on making your bug report more useful (and thus more likely to get answered and fixed):

  1. Post as much information as possible.

    This means we need more information than a simple "MS Word crashes whenever I run it. Do you know why?" Include at least the following information:

  2. Re-run the program with the --debugmsg +relay option (i.e., wine --debugmsg +relay sol.exe).

    If Wine crashes while running your program, it is important that we have this information to have a chance at figuring out what is causing the crash. This can put out quite a lot (several MB) of information, though, so it's best to output it to a file. When the Wine-dbg> prompt appears, type quit.

    You might want to try +relay,+snoop instead of +relay, but please note that +snoop is pretty unstable and often will crash earlier than a simple +relay! If this is the case, then please use only +relay!! A bug report with a crash in +snoop code is useless in most cases!

    To get the trace output, use the following commands:

    report_file will now contain the last hundred lines of the debugging output, including the register dump and backtrace, which are the most important pieces of information. Please do not delete this part, even if you don't understand what it means.

  3. Post your report to the newsgroup comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine

    In your post, include all of the information from part 1), and insert the text from the output file in part 2). If you do this, your chances of receiving some sort of helpful response should be very good.