Chris Quenelle's Weblog
Thoughts on developer tools.

All | Dbx | Development Tools | Life in General | OpenSolaris | plus | Software Philosophy | Sun Studio

fav comics

« Previous day (Mar 13, 2006) | Main | Next day (Mar 15, 2006) »
20060314 Tuesday March 14, 2006

Reporting bugs

We get bug reports in the forums all the time with incomplete information.  So I figured I would summarize the information that we need to help diagnose a problem.

All the Sun Studio tools should respond to a -V option. (that's a captial V)  The output of this should also include any patches that affected that command binary.

For example, here is the output from Sun Studio 11 dbx that has been patched:

% dbx -V
Sun Dbx Debugger 7.5 Patch 121023-01 2006/02/09

In order to know what kind of system you're running on, there are two simple things that help. All the Linux and Solaris systems that we support have a 'uname' command with a '-a' option to show all the fields.

Solaris: uname -a
SunOS steppe 5.10 Generic_118822-23 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Blade-1000
Linux: uname -a
Linux opterra3 2.6.5-7.97-default #1 Fri Jul 2 14:21:59 UTC 2004 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

The uname output for Linux doesn't include the distribution name in most cases, so for Linux it's also helpful to run the following command:
(for example)

% cat /etc/*release
LSB_VERSION="1.3"
SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 (i586)
VERSION = 9

For problems with the IDE it can also help to show the output of 'java -version'.

By providing us with this basic information when you first submit a problem, you will probably get a helpful response much more quickly because we can check for any known bugs that might have been fixed in a patch or in a newer release.

Posted by Chris Quenelle ( Mar 14 2006, 11:07:51 AM PST ) - Permalink - -

Older blog entries:

mug shot Chris Quenelle is a tools developer at Sun Microsystems. He's worked on performance and debugging tools at Sun for more than 10 years. He reads comic books and science fiction, and has more tivos than he can keep track of.

Calendar

« March 2006 »
SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
   
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
 
       
Today

RSS Feeds

XML
All
/Dbx
/Development Tools
/Life in General
/OpenSolaris
/plus
/Software Philosophy
/Sun Studio

Search

Links

Navigation

Referers

Today's Page Hits: 298