written by Gerard Patel (???) (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. 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 a message to the comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine newsgroup with the "Nice Formatted Report" attatched. If possible, upload the full debug output to a web/ftp server and provide the address in your message. 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 installed 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! 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 your report to the newsgroup comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine In your post, include all of the information from part 1), and insert the text from the output file in part 2). If you do this, your chances of receiving some sort of helpful response should be very good. 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 comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine to let us know how this document can be improved.