_ _ ____ _ ___| | | | _ \| | / __| | | | |_) | | | (__| |_| | _ <| |___ \___|\___/|_| \_\_____| BUGS Curl and libcurl have grown substantially since the beginning. At the time of writing (July 2007), there are about 47000 lines of source code, and by the time you read this it has probably grown even more. Of course there are lots of bugs left. And lots of misfeatures. To help us make curl the stable and solid product we want it to be, we need bug reports and bug fixes. WHERE TO REPORT If you can't fix a bug yourself and submit a fix for it, try to report an as detailed report as possible to a curl mailing list to allow one of us to have a go at a solution. You should also post your bug/problem at curl's bug tracking system over at http://sourceforge.net/bugs/?group_id=976 (but please read the sections below first before doing that) If you feel you need to ask around first, find a suitable mailing list and post there. The lists are available on http://curl.haxx.se/mail/ WHAT TO REPORT When reporting a bug, you should include all information that will help us understand what's wrong, what you expected to happen and how to repeat the bad behavior. You therefore need to tell us: - your operating system's name and version number (uname -a under a unix is fine) - what version of curl you're using (curl -V is fine) - versions of the used libraries that libcurl is built to use - what URL you were working with (if possible), at least which protocol and anything and everything else you think matters. Tell us what you expected to happen, tell use what did happen, tell us how you could make it work another way. Dig around, try out, test. Then include all the tiny bits and pieces in your report. You will benefit from this yourself, as it will enable us to help you quicker and more accurately. Since curl deals with networks, it often helps us if you include a protocol debug dump with your bug report. The output you get by using the -v or --trace options. If curl crashed, causing a core dump (in unix), there is hardly any use to send that huge file to anyone of us. Unless we have an exact same system setup as you, we can't do much with it. Instead we ask you to get a stack trace and send that (much smaller) output to us instead! The address and how to subscribe to the mailing lists are detailed in the MANUAL file. HOW TO GET A STACK TRACE First, you must make sure that you compile all sources with -g and that you don't 'strip' the final executable. Try to avoid optimizing the code as well, remove -O, -O2 etc from the compiler options. Run the program until it cores. Run your debugger on the core file, like '<debugger> curl core'. <debugger> should be replaced with the name of your debugger, in most cases that will be 'gdb', but 'dbx' and others also occur. When the debugger has finished loading the core file and presents you a prompt, enter 'where' (without the quotes) and press return. The list that is presented is the stack trace. If everything worked, it is supposed to contain the chain of functions that were called when curl crashed. Include the stack trace with your detailed bug report. It'll help a lot.