BUG REPORTS

Please read this file before sending in a bug report or patch.

Also, PLEASE read the documentation first.  90% of the mail I get
complaining about procps is due to the sender not having read the
documentation!


Where to send
=============
Send comments, bug reports, patches, etc., to albert@users.sf.net


What to send
============
It is much more useful to me if a program really crashes to recompile it
with make "CC=gcc -ggdb -O", run it with "gdb prog" and "run" and send
me a stack trace ('bt' command).  That said, any bug report is still
better than none.

strace and ltrace output are very helpful:

        strace -o output-file ps --blah
        bzip2 output-file

It might be nice to get rid of miscellaneous compiler warnings, but
don't bend over backwards to do it.


Kernel-Dependent Patches
========================
If you send me patches which are specific to *running* with a particular
kernel version of /proc, please condition them with the runtime determined
variable `linux_version_code' from libproc/kvers.c.  It is the same
number as the macro LINUX_VERSION_CODE for which the kernel /proc fs
code was compiled.

A macro is provide in libproc/version.h to construct the code from its
components, e.g.
  if (linux_version_code < LINUX_VERSION(2,5,41))
     /* blah blah blah */
A startup call to set_linux_version may also be necessary.

Of course, if a bug is due to a change in kernel file formats, it would
be best to first try to generalize the parsing, since the code is then
more resilient against future change.

Also unified diffs (diff -u) are my preference, context diffs (diff -c )
are kind of usable, and standard diffs (diff) are more useless than a
generic text description of what you did.  Just use
	diff -Naurd oldfile newfile
or
	diff -Naurd old-procps-dir new-procps-dir
to create your diffs and you will make me happy.  Also make sure to
include a description of what the diff is for or I'm likely to ignore
it because of general lack of time...


Code Structure
==============

A goal is to encapsulate *all* parsing dependent on /proc
file formats into the libproc library.  If the API is general enough
it can hopefully stabilize and then /proc changes might only require
updating libproc.so.  Beyond that having the set of utilities be simple
command lines parsers and output formatters and encapsulating all kernel
divergence in libproc is the way to go.

Hence if you are submitting a new program or are fixing an old one, keep
in mind that adding files to libproc which encapsulate such things is
more desirable than patching the actual driver program.  (well, except
to move it toward the API of the library).
