Your bug reports play an essential role in making ld
reliable.
Reporting a bug may help you by bringing a solution to your problem, or
it may not. But in any case the principal function of a bug report is
to help the entire community by making the next version of ld
work better. Bug reports are your contribution to the maintenance of
ld
.
In order for a bug report to serve its purpose, you must include the information that enables us to fix the bug.
If you are not sure whether you have found a bug, here are some guidelines:
ld
bug. Reliable linkers never crash.
ld
produces an error message for valid input, that is a bug.
ld
does not produce an error message for invalid input, that
may be a bug. In the general case, the linker can not verify that
object files are correct.
ld
are welcome in any case.
A number of companies and individuals offer support for GNU
products. If you obtained ld
from a support organization, we
recommend you contact that organization first.
You can find contact information for many support companies and individuals in the file `etc/SERVICE' in the GNU Emacs distribution.
In any event, we also recommend that you send bug reports for ld
to `bug-gnu-utils@gnu.org'.
The fundamental principle of reporting bugs usefully is this: report all the facts. If you are not sure whether 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 some details do not matter. Thus, you might assume that the name of a symbol you use in an example does not matter. Well, probably it does not, but one cannot be sure. Perhaps the bug is a stray memory reference which happens to fetch from the location where that name is stored in memory; perhaps, if the name were different, the contents of that location would fool the linker into doing the right thing despite the bug. Play it safe and give a specific, complete example. That is the easiest thing for you to do, 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?" 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 fix the bug, you should include all these things:
ld
. ld
announces it if you start it with
the `--version' argument.
Without this, we will not know whether there is any point in looking for
the bug in the current version of ld
.
ld
source, including any
patches made to the BFD
library.
ld
---e.g.
"gcc-2.7
".
gas
or compiled using
gcc
, then it may be OK to send the source files rather than the
object files. In this case, be sure to say exactly what version of
gas
or gcc
was used to produce the object files. Also say
how gas
or gcc
were configured.
ld
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 ld
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.
ld
source, send us context
diffs, as generated by diff
with the `-u', `-c', or
`-p' option. Always send diffs from the old file to the new file.
If you even discuss something in the ld
source, refer to it by
context, not by line number.
The line numbers in our development sources will not match those in your
sources. Your line numbers would convey no useful information to us.
Here are some things that are not necessary:
ld
it is very hard to
construct an example that will make the program follow a certain path
through the code. If you do not send us the example, we will not be
able to construct one, so we will not be able to verify that the bug is
fixed.
And if we cannot understand what bug you are trying to fix, or why your
patch should be an improvement, we will not install it. A test case will
help us to understand.
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