Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 4 - USING BINUTILS Using Instructions page 68

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Without this, we will not know whether there is any point in looking for the bug in the current
version of the binary utilities.
Any patches you may have applied to the source, including any patches made to the
•
The type of machine you are using, and the operating system name and version number.
•
What compiler (and its version) was used to compile the utilities--e.g. "
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The command arguments you gave the utility to 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, or set of input files, that will reproduce the bug. If the utility is reading an
•
object file or files, then it is generally most helpful to send the actual object files, uuencoded if
necessary to get them through the mail system. Note that
list, so you should avoid sending very large files to it. Making the files available for anonymous
FTP is OK.
If the source files were produced exclusively using gnu programs (e.g.,
), then it may be OK to send the source files rather than the object files. In this case, be sure to
ld
say exactly what version of
, or whatever, was configured.
gcc
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 the utility 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 the utility is out of synch, or you have encoun-
tered 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 source, send us context diffs, as generated by
•
, , or option. Always send diffs from the old file to the new file. If you wish to discuss
-u -c -p
something in the
ld
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.
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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 conve-
nience 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.
, or whatever, was used to produce the object files. Also say how
gcc
source, refer to it by context, not by line number.
Chapter 17. Reporting Bugs
gcc-2.7
bug-binutils@gnu.org
,
gcc gas
library.
BFD
".
is a mailing
, and/or the gnu
with the
diff