Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 4 - USING BINUTILS Using Instructions

Also see for ENTERPRISE LINUX 4 - DEVELOPER TOOLS GUIDE: Installation guide Installation guide Tuning guide Installation guide Manual

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Chapter 17.Reporting BugsYour bug reports play an essential role in making the binary utilities reliable.Reporting a bug may help you by bringing a solution to your problem, or it may not. But in any casethe principal function of a bug report is to help the entire community by making the next version ofthe binary utilities work better. Bug reports are your contribution to their maintenance.In order for a bug report to serve its purpose, you must include the information that enables us to fixthe bug.17.1. Have You Found a Bug?If you are not sure whether you have found a bug, here are some guidelines:• If a binary utility gets a fatal signal, for any input whatever, that is a bug. Reliable utilities nevercrash.• If a binary utility produces an error message for valid input, that is a bug.• If you are an experienced user of binary utilities, your suggestions for improvement are welcomein any case.17.2. How to Report BugsA number of companies and individuals offer support for gnu products. If you obtained the binaryutilities from a support organization, we recommend you contact that organization first.You can find contact information for many support companies and individuals in the fileetc/SERVICE in the gnu Emacs distribution.In any event, we also recommend that you send bug reports for the binary utilities tobug-binutils@gnu.org.The fundamental principle of reporting bugs usefully is this: report all the facts. If you are not surewhether to state a fact or leave it out, state it!Often people omit facts because they think they know what causes the problem and assume that somedetails do not matter. Thus, you might assume that the name of a file you use in an example does notmatter. Well, probably it does not, but one cannot be sure. Perhaps the bug is a stray memory referencewhich happens to fetch from the location where that pathname is stored in memory; perhaps, if thepathname were different, the contents of that location would fool the utility into doing the right thingdespite the bug. Play it safe and give a specific, complete example. That is the easiest thing for you todo, and the most helpful.Keep in mind that the purpose of a bug report is to enable us to fix the bug if it is new to us. Therefore,always write your bug reports on the assumption that the bug has not been reported previously.Sometimes people give a few sketchy facts and ask, "Does this ring a bell?" This cannot help us fixa bug, so it is basically useless. We respond by asking for enough details to enable us to investigate.You might as well expedite matters by sending them to begin with.To enable us to fix the bug, you should include all these things:• The version of the utility. Each utility announces it if you start it with the -version argument.