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arpinux edited this page Feb 7, 2012 · 4 revisions

You want to help WMFS? You can debug it whenever you encounter a crash, such as a segmentation fault.
To do so, you’ll need to install the Xephyr and gdb packages for your distribution.
Next, we need to compile a special debugging version of WMFS. From the WMFS source directory, run:

$ make clean
$ env CFLAGS="-Wall -g -ggdb3 -O0 -fno-inline" make

Launch Xephyr:
$ Xephyr -ac -br -noreset -screen 800x600 :1 :1 is the display of our “false X” (Xephyr)
If you don’t have Xephyr you can launch X manually from the TTY:$ X :1 &
Next, launch the new debug version of WMFS inside the debugger:
run from the wmfs source directory:
$ DISPLAY=:1 gdb wmfs 2>&1 | tee wmfs-gdb.log
gdb> run

You may have to press Ctrl+Shift to make Xephyr grab the mouse and keyboard, press those keys again to release.

Now, simply reproduce the crash and gdb will report an error. Copy this error to a file; for example wmfs-gdb.log.
Finally, we’d also like a backtrace so we can see exactly where the bug is occurring:

gdb> bt
<the backtrace>

Add the backtrace details to the log file you created above and attach this log to your new issue ticket.

Congratulations, that’s your first bug report!

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