An Embeddable Scripting Engine

Jx9 Online Support.

Bug reporting

Jx9 have grown substantially since the beginning. At the time of writing, there are about 58000 lines of source code and by the time you read this it has probably grown even more.

Jx9 is a fairly stable and extensively tested product, but minor obscure bugs may still occurs. To help us make Jx9 the stable and solid product we want it to be, we need bug reports and bug fixes.

1.0 Where to report

If you can't fix a bug yourself and submit a fix for it, try to report an as detailed report using the online Jx9 bug tracking system over at

        https://github.com/symisc/PH7/issues
(but please read the sections below first before doing that).

1.1 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

- what version of Jx9 you're using

- Jx9 compile-time options such as if threading support is enabled and so on.

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.

If Jx9 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!

1.2 Jx9 problems

First, post all Jx9 problems on the Jx9 public forums or the jx9-users mailing list.

Tell us the Jx9 version and your operating system. Tell us the name and version of all relevant sub-components.

Showing us a real source code example repeating your problem is the best way to get our attention and it will greatly increase our chances to understand your problem and to work on a fix (if we agree it truly is a problem).

Lots of problems that appear to be Jx9 problems are actually just abuses of the Jx9 API or other malfunctions in your applications. It is advised that you run your problematic program using a memory debug tool like valgrind or similar before you post memory-related or "crashing" problems to us.

1.3 Who will fix the problems

If the problems or bugs you describe are considered to be bugs, we want to have the problems fixed.

But please do not assume that you can just lump over something to us and it will then magically be fixed after some given time. Most often we need feedback and help to understand what you've experienced and how to repeat a problem. Then we may only be able to assist YOU to debug the problem and to track down the proper fix.

We get reports from many people every month and each report can take a considerable amount of time to really go to the bottom with.

1.4 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> jx9_app 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.

1.5 Bugs in Jx9 bindings

There will of course pop up bugs in Jx9 bindings. You should then primarily approach the team that works on that particular binding and see what you can do to help them fix the problem.