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By Juergen Haas, About.com

of the original one, that is a convenience. Errors in the output will be easier to spot, running under the debugger will take less time, etc.

However, simplification is not vital; if you can't do this or don't have time to try, please report the bug with your original test case.

  • A core dump file.

    Debugging the core dump might be useful, but it can only be done on your machine, with your Emacs executable. Therefore, sending the core dump file to the Emacs maintainers won't be useful. Above all, don't include the core file in an email bug report! Such a large message can be extremely inconvenient.

  • A system-call trace of Emacs execution.

    System-call traces are very useful for certain special kinds of debugging, but in most cases they give little useful information. It is therefore strange that many people seem to think that the way to report information about a crash is to send a system-call trace. Perhaps this is a habit formed from experience debugging programs that don't have source code or debugging symbols.

    In most programs, a backtrace is normally far, far more informative than a system-call trace. Even in Emacs, a simple backtrace is generally more informative, though to give full information you should supplement the backtrace by displaying variable values and printing them as Lisp objects with pr (see above).

  • A patch for the bug.

    A patch for the bug is useful if it is a good one. But don't omit the other information that a bug report needs, such as the test case, on the assumption that a patch is sufficient. We might see problems with your patch and decide to fix the problem another way, or we might not understand it at all. And if we can't understand what bug you are trying to fix, or why your patch should be an improvement, we mustn't install it.

  • A guess about what the bug is or what it depends on.

    Such guesses are usually wrong. Even experts can't guess right about such things without first using the debugger to find the facts.

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