Current bugreport address: mjr@decuac.dec.com Current items of interest to entire development team: untermud@decuac.dec.com UnterMUD bugs: -------------- In order to quickly and efficiently fix bugs in UnterMUD, there are a few steps users can follow to help provide as much information as possible about the state of their server. This will significantly improve turn around time on bugfixes, since otherwise programmers have to try to replicate the bug and have to spend more time tracking problems. If you've got a server that crashes, these are some of the steps you can follow to help diagnose it. If there's a core file: ----------------------- If there's a core file left by the crash (in the database directory) use either dbx or adb to provide a stack trace of the server state when it died. This may or may not work, depending on whether or not the server executable was stripped of symbol table information, or compiled with debugging information turned off. It is recommended that if you are making modifications to the server yourself, that you leave debugging turned on, and do not bother running the code through the optimizer. The code is plenty fast enough as it is. If your code *IS* stripped and optimized, your debugger will probably complain at you. Give us the information anyhow - anything can help!!! If you have dbx: Make a 'typescript' of the session, so you can just mail it in. yourhost-> script yourhost-> dbx mud /path/name/of/core/file Reading symbolic information... Read 55 symbols (dbx) where main(0x1, 0xefffd1c, 0xefffd24) at 0x20be (dbx) quit yourhost-> exit Script done, file is typescript If you have adb: yourhost-> script yourhost-> adb mud /path/name/of/core/file core file = core -- program ``mud'' SIGSEGV 11: segmentation violation $C _main(0x1,0xefffd1c,0xefffd24) + 1e ^D yourhost-> exit Script done, file is typescript The output of either of those is fairly useful for debugging. Other Useful stuff you can send: -------------------------------- Tell us the operating system, and version on which you built the server. Also, whether you uses the system compiler, or gcc. Last but not least, tell us the version of UnterMUD you are using. There is a file, config.h, which contains the server version. Each object module also has an RCS information header in it, which gives the revision of that file. This information is useful, if you have an older version of a file that may have bugs which have been fixed elsewhere. You can get that information as follows: yourhost-> grep VERSION_STRING config.h #define VERSION_STRING "V1.0A" yourhost-> strings mud | grep Header $Header: /mud.c,v 1.1 91/05/04 17:45:11 mjr Exp $ $Header: /cron.c,v 1.1 91/05/04 17:45:11 mjr Exp $ $Header: /net_bsd.c,v 1.1 91/05/04 17:45:12 mjr Exp $ $Header: /login.c,v 1.1 91/05/04 17:45:13 mjr Exp $ [...and so on...]