xps
Process tree display and manipulation for the X Window System.
by Rocky Bernstein

Sometimes xps has bugs. Here are some hints for isolating them; the more information you can give me about the problem, the better the odds that someone will be able to fix. But, if you don't have time to go through these steps, please report the bug anyway -- even vague bug reports can be better than no bug report at all.

BASICS

What are you doing here? Go read README, and then the man page to make sure you have the necessary prerequistes for building/running the program and to make sure the program is supposed to do what you expect it to do.

Do you have the most recent version? Go make sure. http://www.netwinder.org/~rocky/xps-home/.

COMPILATION PROBLEMS

If you get an error running the configure script, the first thing you should try is deleting the config.cache file, and running again. If that doesn't fix it, the information I'll need to see to make sense of the problem is the following:

• everything printed to stderr/stdout when you first ran ./configure;

• the contents of the config.log file.

Make sure you blow away the config.cache file before regenerating this info, or else the config.log file will be mostly empty/useless.

Experience seems to show that the most common configure problem is that sites have gcc installed, but installed improperly. The configure script will always try to use gcc in preference to another compiler if gcc exists, so if gcc exists but is broken, it won't work. Your options are:

• get someone to fix the gcc installation;

• rearrange your $PATH so that the broken gcc is not on it;

• or pass $CC in the environment, like so:

  csh:  setenv CC cc ; ./configure
  sh:   CC=cc ; ./configure
  

before doing this, you'll need to nuke config.cache.

If you get errors about not being able to find Motif (the Xm/ header files), and you can't find them on your system, then your system is horked and your vendor is lame. Perhaps the problem is that you don't have some kind of ``development option'' Xm/ (Motif) is available on all commercial systems except SunOS 4.x and some early releases of Solaris. For Linux and other free Unixes systems, a Motif clone is available from http://www.lesstif.org/.

RUN-TIME PROBLEMS

• Compile with make CFLAGS=-g (so that if you get a core dump, there will be debugging info in it.)

• What platform are you running on? What does the included ./config.guess shell script print?

• What visual are you using? Send the output of the xdpyinfo command.

• What exactly goes wrong? No, I don't know what you mean by ``crash''. Does it print an ``X Error'' and exit? Does it dump core? Does it go into a loop?

• If it dumps core, what does the core file say? Run the program under a debugger, and show me the stack trace. To extract a stack trace from a core file with gdb, do this:

  gdb ./xps ./core
  bt
  

  To extract a stack trace from a core file with dbx, do this:

  dbx ./xps ./core
  where
  

  If the bottom few lines of the output don't include the function main(), then something's wrong: are you sure the core file came from that program?

$Id: bugs.html,v 1.1 2000/11/26 02:47:49 rocky Exp $