Chapter 43.

Reporting Bugs

Your bug reports play an essential role in making

as

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

as

work better. Bug reports are your contribution to the maintenance of

as

.

In order for a bug report to serve its purpose, you must include the information that enables us to fix

the bug.

43.1. Have You Found a Bug?

If you are not sure whether you have found a bug, here are some guidelines:

If the assembler gets a fatal signal, for any input whatever, that is a

as

bug. Reliable assemblers

never crash.

If

as

produces an error message for valid input, that is a bug.

If

as

does not produce an error message for invalid input, that is a bug. However, you should note

that your idea of "invalid input" might be our idea of "an extension" or "support for traditional

practice".

If you are an experienced user of assemblers, your suggestions for improvement of

as

are welcome

in any case.

43.2. How to Report Bugs

A number of companies and individuals offer support for gnu products. If you obtained

as

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

as

to

bug binutils@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 assembler 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?" This cannot help us fix

a 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: