How to get a backtrace

2020-01-26

When you’re running profanity master it may occur that profanity crashes with SIGSEGV or SIGABRT when new features are added. If this happens it is helpful to provide a backtrace for the developers to find and fix the bug.

I will explain one possibility how to get a backtrace of profanity (or any other TUI application)¹:

Preparation

The following requirements must be installed:

gdb
gdbserver
debug symbols (depending on your distribution they might already be included)
- e.g. profanity-dbgsym (for debian)
- e.g. libstrophe0-dbgsym (for debian)
- e.g. libexpat1-dbgsym (for debian)

Run profanity

Open terminal #1
- Run gdbserver localhost:1234 /usr/bin/profanity
Open terminal #2
- Run gdb /usr/bin/profanity
- Enter target remote localhost:1234
- Enter c
Profanity opens in terminal #1
- Reproduce crash
A gdb command line opens in terminal #2
- Enter bt or bt full ²
Create an issue in the bugtracker and include the output of the previous step (see this example)

This explanation was first published on my personal blog. ↩
bt full gives a much more detailled output but in most cases bt is enough for the dev to know what’s going on. ↩