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BUGS
Curl and libcurl have grown substantially since the beginning. At the time
of writing (July 2007), there are about 47000 lines of source code, and by
the time you read this it has probably grown even more.
Of course there are lots of bugs left. And lots of misfeatures.
To help us make curl the stable and solid product we want it to be, we need
bug reports and bug fixes.
WHERE TO REPORT
If you can't fix a bug yourself and submit a fix for it, try to report an as
detailed report as possible to a curl mailing list to allow one of us to
have a go at a solution. You should also post your bug/problem at curl's bug
tracking system over at
http://sourceforge.net/bugs/?group_id=976
(but please read the sections below first before doing that)
If you feel you need to ask around first, find a suitable mailing list and
post there. The lists are available on http://curl.haxx.se/mail/
WHAT TO REPORT
When reporting a bug, you should include all information that will help us
understand what's wrong, what you expected to happen and how to repeat the
bad behavior. You therefore need to tell us:
- your operating system's name and version number (uname -a under a unix
is fine)
- what version of curl you're using (curl -V is fine)
- versions of the used libraries that libcurl is built to use
- what URL you were working with (if possible), at least which protocol
and anything and everything else you think matters. Tell us what you
expected to happen, tell use what did happen, tell us how you could make it
work another way. Dig around, try out, test. Then include all the tiny bits
and pieces in your report. You will benefit from this yourself, as it will
enable us to help you quicker and more accurately.
Since curl deals with networks, it often helps us if you include a protocol
debug dump with your bug report. The output you get by using the -v or
--trace options.
If curl crashed, causing a core dump (in unix), there is hardly any use to
send that huge file to anyone of us. Unless we have an exact same system
setup as you, we can't do much with it. Instead we ask you to get a stack
trace and send that (much smaller) output to us instead!
The address and how to subscribe to the mailing lists are detailed in the
MANUAL file.
HOW TO GET A STACK TRACE
First, you must make sure that you compile all sources with -g and that you
don't 'strip' the final executable. Try to avoid optimizing the code as
well, remove -O, -O2 etc from the compiler options.
Run the program until it cores.
Run your debugger on the core file, like '<debugger> curl core'. <debugger>
should be replaced with the name of your debugger, in most cases that will
be 'gdb', but 'dbx' and others also occur.
When the debugger has finished loading the core file and presents you a
prompt, enter 'where' (without the quotes) and press return.
The list that is presented is the stack trace. If everything worked, it is
supposed to contain the chain of functions that were called when curl
crashed. Include the stack trace with your detailed bug report. It'll help a
lot.