Debugging Bluefish

In general: It is always a good idea to tell us your version of GTK/Glib installed on your system.

Debugging symbols

To create a meaningful backtrace you'll need a binary with the debugging symbols attached. Otherwise your backtrace will contain a lot of question marks and won't be useful.

Compile with debugging symbols from source

Get the source. To compile it with debugging symbols, CFLAGS must contain -g. You should also use the -O0 -fno-inline -fno-omit-frame-pointer optimization flags there.
$ ./configure CFLAGS="-g3 -O0 -fno-inline -fno-omit-frame-pointer" && make

The stable version of bluefish, namely 1.0.X at the time of writing, currently strips the debugging symbols during the installation step (make install). In this case only re-compile the sources and run the resulting binary src/bluefish in the GNU Debugger.

Install debugging symbols on Debian/Ubuntu systems

To receive debugging symbols for the 1.0 stable series of bluefish in Debian/Ubuntu the sources must be recompiled without stripping the resulting binary. This is done by following these steps :

DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="nostrip noopt" fakeroot apt-get -b source bluefish

For the current development series 1.3 the Debian and Ubuntu packages come with a package shipping the debugging symbols: bluefish-unstable-dbg. Just install it the usual way. You might need some more packages of this type: libc6-dbg, libglib2.0-0-dbg, libgtk2.0-0-dbg or libgtk-3-0-dbg, libxml2-dbg. This requires some space on your harddrive, but will help us to track down your problem and help you.

Install debugging symbols on Fedora

run

debuginfo-install gtk3 libxml2

to get all debug libraries installed

Run Bluefish in the debugger

Create a meaningful backtrace

To run Bluefish in the GNU Debugger, use:

gdb src/bluefish

Then ((gdb) represents the gdb shell prompt!):

(gdb) set logging on
Copying output to gdb.txt.
(gdb) r

This will start bluefish. Now reproduce the crash and then create the backtrace:

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
...
(gdb) bt full
...
(gdb) quit

Now you'll find a file gdb.txt in the directory. Open a report in our BTS and attach this file to the report. This is what a Backtrace Should Look Like.

What other information you should provide to the developers

• the platform you are using
• the gtk version you are using
• the compiler version you are using
• any non-default ./configure options
• the pcre version you are using if you think that is related
• the libaspell version you are using if you think that is related
• the gnome-vfs version you are using if you think that is related (only 1.0 series)

Debugging a Gtk-Critical error

If you set the environment variable G_DEBUG to fatal_criticals, e.g.

export G_DEBUG=fatal_criticals

with bash, it should assert when there is an error. Then launch bluefish with gdb as told you above and you can get a backtrace.

You can set it to fatal_warnings too, however: it will then stop at the first warning, and bluefsh will also give warnings on problems in the language file and such, so this debugging technique is not always useful.

Running bluefish in valgrind

valgrind is a very powerful memory analyser. It makes your program very slow, but it will give very useful logging for each and every possible memory error. Make sure you set the preferences of your terminal to have a lot of lines in the buffer so you can send all of the output to the Bluefish developers!

Run valgrind like this:

G_SLICE=always-malloc G_DEBUG=gc-friendly valgrind --tool=memcheck --num-callers=32 src/bluefish

More information on gtk and valgrind can be found at http://live.gnome.org/Valgrind

Using gobject-list

Download gobject-list.c from http://people.gnome.org/~mortenw/gobject-list.c and compile as is shown in the headers

to see all GObject's that are created or finalized:

LD_PRELOAD=libgobject-list.so src/bluefish

to see all refcount changes on GtkTreeModelSort:

LD_PRELOAD=libgobject-list.so GOBJECT_LIST_FILTER=GtkTreeModelSort GOBJECT_LIST_DISPLAY=all src/bluefish

Notes and references

References: