Debugging

Reporting bugs

Steps to do when you think you found a bug:

• verify the bug exists in the latest version
• report it at Github

Tracing crash bugs

Configure your ZNC version with --enable-debug.

./configure --enable-debug --enable-other-things-you-may-want
make
make install

Then you can run ZNC under gdb:

set logging /tmp/znc.gdb.log
set logging on
gdb ./znc
handle SIGPIPE nostop
run -D

If znc is already running, you can attach gdb to the already-running instance (where pid is znc's process id):

set logging /tmp/znc.gdb.log
set logging on
gdb ./znc
attach pid
handle SIGPIPE nostop
cont

Now you use ZNC as you would always do and try to make it crash. Once it crashed, gdb will show you something like this:

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.

Now we can get the useful info. This info, together with an explanation how the bug happened are then very useful to the developers.

bt full

If you had logging file set and logging enabled, you can find the bt full and everything else in /tmp/znc.gdb.log. You might want to copy it somewhere safe and remove things before the backtrace.

Why use --enable-debug?

With this flag bt full shows much more info, which is needed to understand why the crash had happened. If you're interested in details, search the Web for "debug symbols" or just try with and without.