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://bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=browse.html&product=bluefish

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

Get the source. To compile it with debugging symbols, CFLAGS must contain -g. You should also use the -O0 optimization flag there.
$ ./configure CFLAGS="-g -O0" && make

For more information about compiling from source, see Compiling Bluefish from source.

The stable version of bluefish, namely 2.2.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

For Debian and Ubuntu there are 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"

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, use:

gdb bluefish

or for the 1.0 series (see above):

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.

Notes and references

References: <references/>