Finding and Reporting Bugs
How To Report A Bug
Written by (???)
(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.
With using either approach report the found issues with relevant
Wine Bugzilla.
The Easy Way
Your computer must have perl on it
for this method to work. To find out if you have perl,
run which perl. If it returns something like
/usr/bin/perl, you're in business.
Otherwise, skip on down to "The Hard Way". If you aren't
sure, just keep on going. When you try to run the
script, it will become very apparent
if you don't have perl.
Change directory to <dirs to
wine>/tools
Type in ./bug_report.pl and follow
the directions.
Post the bug to
Wine Bugzilla.
Please, search Bugzilla database to check whether your problem is
already found before posting a bug report.
Include your own detailed description of the problem with
relevant information. Attach the "Nice Formatted Report"
to the submitted bug. Do not cut and paste the report
in the bug description - it is pretty big.
Keep the full debug output in case it will be needed by
Wine developers.
The Hard Way
Some simple advice on making your bug report more useful
(and thus more likely to get answered and fixed):
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:
Version of Wine you're using (run wine
-v)
Operating system you're using, what distribution (if
any), and what version
Compiler and version (run gcc -v)
Windows version, if used with Wine.
Mention if you don't use Windows
Program you're trying to run, its version number,
and a URL for where the program can be obtained (if
available)
Command line you used to start wine
Any other information you think may be relevant or
helpful, such as X server version in case of X
problems, libc version etc.
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!
You can also turn on other parameters, depending on the nature
of the problem you are researching. See wine man page for full list
of the parameters.
To get the trace output, use the following commands:
all shells:
$ echo quit | wine -debugmsg +relay [other_options] program_name >& filename.out;
$ tail -n 100 filename.out > report_file
(This will print wine's debug messages only to the file and then
auto-quit. It's probably a good idea to use this command, since wine
prints out so many debug msgs that they flood the terminal, eating CPU.)
tcsh and other csh-like shells:
$ wine -debugmsg +relay [other_options] program_name |& tee filename.out;
$ tail -100 filename.out > report_file
bash and other sh-like shells:
$ wine -debugmsg +relay [other_options] program_name 2>&1 | tee filename.out;
$ tail -100 filename.out > report_file
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.
Post the bug to
Wine Bugzilla.
Please, search Bugzilla database to check whether your problem is
In your post, include all of the information from part
1), and attach to the bug the output file in part 2).
If you do this, your chances of receiving some sort of
helpful response should be very good.
Questions and comments
If after reading this document there is something you
couldn't figure out, or think could be explained better, or
that should have been included, please post to
Wine Bugzilla to
let us know how this document can be improved.