Keep in mind that the purpose of a bug report is to enable us to x the bug. It may be that the bug has been reported previously, but neither you nor we can know that unless your bug report is complete and self-contained.

Sometimes people give a few sketchy facts and ask, \Does this ring a bell?" Those bug reports are useless, and we urge everyone to refuse to respond to them except to chide the sender to report bugs properly.

To enable us to x the bug, you should include all these things:

•The version of GDB. GDB announces it if you start with no arguments; you can also print it at any time using show version.

Without this, we will not know whether there is any point in looking for the bug in the current version of GDB.

•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 program you are debugging e.g. \HP92453-01 A.10.32.03 HP C Compiler". Use the what command with the pathname of the compile command (`what /opt/ansic/bin/cc', for example) to obtain this information.

•The command arguments you gave the compiler to compile your example and observe the bug. For example, did you use `-O'? 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 script, and all necessary source files, that will reproduce the bug

•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 GDB 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 GDB is out of synch, or you have encountered 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.

Here are some things that are not necessary:

362 Reporting Bugs in GDB