[ardour-users] ardour 2.0 testing

[Phil Frost]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2006 at 07:33:32AM -0800, Mike Fisher wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>    
>   I'll be finishing an album  Cellblock M - the boneyard later on
>   today, so I have lots of free time now.  I'd like to help in
>   testing/debugging ardour2.  I just have a few questions.  What does
>   the DEBUG option in scons do exactly and how do I use it?  I've seen
>   others provide back traces to problems.  How do I do that?  Ardour
>   rocks and I hope I can help make it rock harder.
>    
>   Thanks,
>    
>   Mike
>    
>   cellblockm.com

'DEBUG=yes' directs the ardour build system to include debugging symbols
in the executable it creates. This means it retains information about
the source like function names, line numbers, files, etc. so that a
debugger like gdb can give useful information. It's important if you
want to debug ardour, or provide more useful bug reports. Be sure to use
it both when you run just "scons" to build, and also when running "scons
install". 

To provide a traceback, one way is to run ardour under gdb. You will get
something like this:

shell$ gdb ardour
(gdb) r

ardour runs....

Should something bad happen, like a segfault, the terminal where you ran
ardour will return to the gdb prompt "(gdb)" instead of exiting to the
shell. At this point give gdb the command "thread apply all bt", and
copy the output to your bug report. When you are done with gdb you can
use the command "q" to quit and go back to your shell, or "r" to run
ardour again.