About debugging:

General information:
Debugging is a skill which you can learn. There are quite a few good documents that describe how to make a good bug-reports. Please read them before you get into action, your bug won't run away and it won't kill you. Rather we want to kill the bug and we want your help :-) So lets go to battle well prepared. Here we have the Bugzilla Bug Reporting HOWTO and Simon Tatham from Putty also wrote a very good document: How to Report Bugs Effectively

Specific fluxbox things:

Output from fluxbox:
Like any other app fluxbox sends all messages to the console it was started from. The problem is that under normal circumstances alll output goes to the (alt-ctrl-f1) console. Change in your .xinitrc the exec fluxboxline to exec xterm or whatever your favourite term may be. Start X and start fluxbox in that xterm, and lo and behold, all messages from fluxbox.

The info we want:
We want to know a lot of things. Make sure you know all about them.

• Your operating system / distribution and it's version.
• Fluxbox version, if CVS (or devel. tarball) then which day?
• When did it happen? Did you do something? Can you reproduce it?
• Your settings. They can be found in ~/.fluxbox/init

What to do with core-dumps.
So if you ever get a core dumping fluxbox in the fluxbox you just built from cvs do the following: Go to irc.openprojects.net#fluxbox and tell fluxgen you got a coredump. Give him all info he asks for and he will also ask you to do the following. It's quite a lot of work but anybody with a bit of common sense and some unix experience can do it. Try to read this manual in a comprehending way. So don't bug me with details.

Rebuild fluxbox:
Yes you read it right. To become a real debugger you have to rebuild fluxbox with debugging symbols.
Build fluxbox as usual and add the following option when you do the make:

 CFLAGS=-Wall -g3 CXXFLAGS=-Wall -g3 make

    $ su
    # rpm -ivh fluxbox-0.1.11.1mdk.src.rpm
    # cd /usr/src/RPM/SPECS
    # env DEBUG=true rpm -ba fluxbox.spec
    # rpm -Uvh --force /usr/src/RPM/RPMS/i686/fluxbox*
    # exit
    $ mkdir -p ~/src/fluxbox
    $ cp -R /usr/src/RPM/BUILD/fluxbox* ~/src/fluxbox

Go to the fluxbox directory (So we get the coredump in the right place):

    cd ~/src/fluxbox/src

The shell has a nifty feature that disables core-files so make sure you really get a core file with:

    ulimit -c unlimited

Start X:

    startx

Let's debug:

Do whatever it takes to make Fluxbox dump core. And now we start debugging:

    gdb fluxbox core

And issue this command in gdb:

    where

Now you get a lot of output. Fluxgen wants to know all the output that starts with a: "#"

Now paste that into an e-mail to fluxgen and also attach the four settings files in ~/.fluxbox.
Please do not remove the core and the sourcecode directory yet. Fluxgen may want to ask you a few extra question and then you will need them.

About:
If you find things to improve in this document please send me an e-mail.