Debugging Bluefish
Providing information
In general: It is always a good idea to tell us your version of Bluefish and your version of GTK/Glib installed on your system, both can be found in the About menu. Also don't forget to mention the platform (Linux, OSX, Windows, FreeBSD, etc.) and it's version. If you have the possibility to test it on multiple computers with different platforms or versions this will really help to track down the problem. If you can reproduce a crash on some specific file, please send us the file too. The smaller the file, the easier for us to debug the issue.
Crash reports / bugs are collected here: https://sourceforge.net/p/bluefish/tickets/
Specific crash information
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
The Bluefish makefile strips the debugging symbols during the installation step (make install). In this case only re-compile the sources, run make install to install required files (in /usr/local/share/bluefish) and then run the resulting binary from the compile directory src/bluefish in the GNU Debugger.
Install debugging symbols on Debian/Ubuntu systems
For Debian and Ubuntu there might be packages available with debugging symbols. This package is called bluefish-dbg. Just install it the usual way, for example from the commandline with "apt-get install bluefish-dbg". If they are not available for your distribution or version you have to compile from source.
You might need some more packages of this type: libc6-dbg, libglib2.0-0-dbg, libgtk-3-0-dbg, libpcre3-dbg, libxml2-dbg.
Run Bluefish in the debugger
Create a meaningful backtrace
To run Bluefish in the GNU Debugger (assuming you have just compiled it, and ran make install), 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.
Debugging a Gtk-Critical error
If you set the environment variable G_DEBUG to fatal_warnings, e.g.
export G_DEBUG=fatal_warnings
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.
debugging on windows
mypaint has a good tutorial: https://github.com/mypaint/mypaint/wiki/Debugging-crashes-on-Windows
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