Debugging Cream Browser

If you get a crash in Cream-Browser. It may be very helpful for us to have a lot of informations.

This document will help you to produce a verbose output which will help you to fix an eventual bug.

Build Cream-Browser in debug mode

To debug Cream-Browser, you need debug-symbols, so configure the project in debug mode then build it :

$ ./configure --debug
$ make clean all

This will build Cream-Browser with more strict CFLAGS and with debug-symbols.

Using gdb to create a bug report

gdb is one of my favorite tool, very helpful to debug every program. We're gonna to use it in the next of the HowTo.

NB: From here, I will suppose that you didn't installed Cream-Browser and you're doing every commands from an archive or the cloned git repository.

Because Cream-Browser isn't installed, lua library isn't too. So you need to modify the environment variable LUA_PATH to tell Cream-Browser to look in the specified directory.

In the same way, you have to modify your environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH to tell Cream-Browser where to search modules, and specify the path to your configuration file.

The final command is :

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:src/modules/mod-dummy" \
LUA_PATH="${LUA_PATH};src/lua/?.lua;src/lua/?/init.lua" \
gdb -q src/cream-browser
(gdb) run -c path/to/your/rc.lua

Now reproduce the bug. When Cream-Browser crashes, gdb will give you back the control (via the gdb's shell).

(gdb) bt
<the backtrace>

Here only the backtrace is important. Paste it somewhere (on the mailing list, or on https://gist.github.com/ ), we will do the best to fix it :)