How to submit a bug report
From Emergent
If you are having a problem following software build/install instructions on the sysadmin hub, have a question about using the software not described in the user hub, or have any other questions related to the software, please send an e-mail to the emergent-users mailing list. Before sending an e-mail, you should read this essay on How to Report Bugs Effectively. You can also search our bug tracker, wiki and Google to see if this is an outstanding or documented issue. You are likely to get a response to your e-mail with lightning speed, but if you didn't include critical information, our reply won't contain a fix, but rather a request for more information! You can save a round trip e-mail by including:
- an accurate description of the problem
- the steps you've tried
- critical details about your operating system and environment
- and the versions of all the tools you are using.
The following are some basic cases where you might need some help, and the kinds of information we would like to see:
Contents |
Problems building the software
We are assembling a FAQ-Building page of commonly encountered build problems and their solutions. Please consult this first.
If you are building emergent, which begins with running autoreconf and then running our configure script, always attach the output of configure, and a file named config.log that configure generates in that directory. If you are having a problem after running make, include all of the previous information in addition to the makefile output. You can save all this information to file with the following shell script, or by running each as a command manually if not all of them are relevant to your problem. Then send an e-mail with versions.log, autoreconf.log, configure.log, config.log and make.log as attachments. Please do not include the output in the body of the e-mail unless it is very small.
#!/bin/bash touch versions.log automake --version >> versions.log autoconf --version >> versions.log libtool --version >> versions.log port list installed >> versions.log autoreconf &> autoreconf.log ./configure &> configure.log make &> make.log
Program crashes
If emergent crashes, such as a SIGSEGV or bus error (same thing, different OSes), you can generate a crash report. This contains critical information that can sometimes allow us to see the problem immediately. These kinds of bugs are best reported on the bug tracker, where you can attach the crash report, and provide a detailed description of exactly what you were doing to cause the crash. Ideally, you can reproduce the crash reliably with a fixed set of actions, in which case please attach the project file and the list of actions so we can reproduce and fix the problem.
Crash reports on OSX
The Mac platform has a built-in stack trace function that appears when a program crashes (see submitting a crash report on OSX for more info). You will see a dialog asking you if you want to Close or Reopen the application, or Report... the bug -- use this Report.. option, which will bring up another window with a "stack trace" of where the program was when it crashed. This is very valuable information for us -- please copy and paste the contents of this window in with your crash report. Thanks!!
Crash reports on Kubuntu
Kubutnu also has a crash trace program that should appear on a crash -- copy it and include along with bug report.
