7.2. How To Report A Bug

Please report all bugs along any relevant information to Wine Bugzilla. Please, search the Bugzilla database to check whether your problem is already reported. If it is already reported please add any relevant information to the original bug report.

7.2.1. All Bug Reports

Some simple advice on making your bug report more useful (and thus more likely to get answered and fixed):

  1. Post as much relevant information as possible.

    This means we need more information than a simple "MS Word crashes whenever I run it. Do you know why?" Include at least the following information:

  2. Re-run the program with the --debugmsg +relay option (i.e., wine --debugmsg +relay sol.exe).

    This will output additional information at the console that may be helpful in debugging the program. It also slows the execution of program. There are some cases where the bug seems to disappear when +relay is used. Please mention that in the bug report.

7.2.2. Crashes

If Wine crashes while running your program, it is important that we have this information to have a chance at figuring out what is causing the crash. This can put out quite a lot (several MB) of information, though, so it's best to output it to a file. When the Wine-dbg> prompt appears, type quit.

You might want to try +relay,+snoop instead of +relay, but please note that +snoop is pretty unstable and often will crash earlier than a simple +relay! If this is the case, then please use only +relay!! A bug report with a crash in +snoop code is useless in most cases! You can also turn on other parameters, depending on the nature of the problem you are researching. See wine man page for full list of the parameters.

To get the trace output, use one of the following methods:

7.2.2.2. The Hard Way

It is likely that only the last 100 or so lines of the trace are necessary to find out where the program crashes. In order to get those last 100 lines we need to do the following

  1. Redirect all the output of -debugmsg to a file.

  2. Separate the last 100 lines to another file using tail .

This can be done using one of the following methods.

all shells:
$ echo quit | wine -debugmsg +relay [other_options] program_name >& filename.out;
$ tail -n 100 filename.out > report_file
             

(This will print wine's debug messages only to the file and then auto-quit. It's probably a good idea to use this command, since wine prints out so many debug msgs that they flood the terminal, eating CPU cycles.)

tcsh and other csh-like shells:
$ wine -debugmsg +relay [other_options] program_name |& tee filename.out;
$ tail -100 filename.out > report_file
             
bash and other sh-like shells:
$ wine -debugmsg +relay [other_options] program_name 2>&1 | tee filename.out;
$ tail -100 filename.out > report_file
             

report_file will now contain the last hundred lines of the debugging output, including the register dump and backtrace, which are the most important pieces of information. Please do not delete this part, even if you don't understand what it means.

Post the bug to Wine Bugzilla. You need to attach the output file report_file from part 2). Along with the the relevant information used to create it. Do not cut and paste the report in the bug description - it is pretty big and it will make a mess of the bug report. If you do this, your chances of receiving some sort of helpful response should be very good.

Please, search the Bugzilla database to check whether your problem is already reported. If it is already reported attach the output file report_file to the original bug report and add any other relevant information.