Hi!
I have this question: which are the softwares that allow me to find/
analyze bugs in the open source softwares?? (like Bugzilla...)
Thank's so much!
I'm quite new to debugging, 90% of what I know about it has been
learned in the last week from Nate Eldredge (thanks by the way Nate).
Bugs manifest themselves in many ways. Here's a few different kinds:
1) Directly observable, e.g. if the window title is "Internet
Exlr;l;;;?;;?" instead of "Internet Explorer".
2) Bugs that result from violations of the C standard, but that don't
violate the machine code rules. An example would be writing off the
end of an array into another array on the same function-call stack,
there's nothing wrong with doing that in machine code but it's a no-no
in C. Such bugs result in the corruption of data (which might lead to
a crash).
3) Bugs that result from violations of both C and machine code, such
as trying to access a region of memory that you just plain aren't
allowed to access. Such errors result in a "segmentation fault" and
your program dies.
To troubleshoot the first bug, look for the piece of code that sets
the window's title, go through it line by line and look for the
mistake.
To troubleshoot the second and third bugs, you can use a thing called
"mudflap" that comes with the GCC compiler. The way mudflap works is
that it will inform you of any dodgy memory accesses. You can choose
to have mudflap kill the program resulting in a "core dump", and then
use a debugger such as GDB to analyse the core dump to see where the
error occurred.