written by (???) (Extracted from wine/documentation/bugreports) A problem that can happen sometimes is 'it used to work before, now it doesn't anymore...'. Here is a step by step procedure to try to pinpoint when the problem occured. This is NOT for casual users. Get the 'full cvs' archive from winehq. This archive is the cvs tree but with the tags controlling the versioning system. It's a big file (> 15 meg) with a name like full-cvs-<last update date> (it's more than 100mb when uncompressed, you can't very well do this with small, old computers or slow Internet connections). untar it into a repository directory: cd /home/gerard tar -zxffull-cvs-2000-05-20.tar.gz mv wine repository extract a new destination directory. This directory must not be in a subdirectory of the repository else cvs will think it's part of the repository and deny you an extraction in the repository: cd /home/gerard mv wine wine_current (-> this protects your current wine sandbox, if any) export CVSROOT=/home/gerard/repository cd /home/gerard cvs -d $CVSROOT checkout wine Note that it's not possible to do a checkout at a given date; you always do the checkout for the last date where the full-cvs-xxx snapshot was generated. you will have now in the ~/wine directory an image of the cvs tree, on the client side. Now update this image to the date you want: cd /home/gerard/wine cvs -d $CVSROOT update -D "1999-06-01" The date format is YYYY-MM-DD. Many messages will inform you that more recent files have been deleted to set back the client cvs tree to the date you asked, for example: cvs update: tsx11/ts_xf86dga2.c is no longer in the repository cvs update is not limited to upgrade to a newer version as I have believed for far too long :-( Now proceed as for a normal update: ./configure make depend && make When you have found the exact date when a bug was added to the cvs tree, use something like : cvs -d $CVSROOT diff -D "1999-07-10" -D "1999-07-12" to get all the differences between the last cvs tree version known to work and code that first displayed the misbehavior. I did not include flags for diff since they are in my .cvsrc file: cvs -z 3 update -dPA diff -u From this diff file, particularly the file names, and the ChangeLog, it's usually possible to find the different individual patches that were done at this time. If any non-programmer reads this, the fastest method to get at the point where the problem occured is to use a binary search, that is, if the problem occured in 1999, start at mid-year, then is the problem is already here, back to 1st April, if not, to 1st October, and so on. The next step is to start from the last working version and to dig the individual contributions from http://www.integrita.com/cgi-local/lwgate.pl/WINE-PATCHES/ (where the Wine patches mailing list is archived) If the patch was done by the Wine maintainer or if it was sent directly to his mail address without going first through wine-patches, you are out of luck as you will never find the patch in the archive. If it is, it's often possible to apply the patches one by one to last working cvs snapshot, compile and test. If you have saved the next candidate as /home/gerard/buggedpatch1.txt: cd /home/gerard/wine patch -p 0 < /home/gerard/buggedpatch1.txt Beware that the committed patch is not always identical to the patch that the author sent to wine-patches, as sometimes the Wine maintainer changes things a bit. If you find one patch that is getting the cvs source tree to reproduce the problem, you have almost won; post the problem on comp.emulators.windows.wine and there is a chance that the author will jump in to suggest a fix; or there is always the possibility to look hard at the patch until it is coerced to reveal where is the bug :-)