This is Info file as.info, produced by Makeinfo-1.64 from the input file ./as.texinfo. START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY * As: (as). The GNU assembler. END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY This file documents the GNU Assembler "as". Copyright (C) 1991, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 1997 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one. Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions.  File: as.info, Node: Reporting Bugs, Next: Acknowledgements, Prev: Machine Dependencies, Up: Top Reporting Bugs ************** Your bug reports play an essential role in making `as' reliable. Reporting a bug may help you by bringing a solution to your problem, or it may not. But in any case the principal function of a bug report is to help the entire community by making the next version of `as' work better. Bug reports are your contribution to the maintenance of `as'. In order for a bug report to serve its purpose, you must include the information that enables us to fix the bug. * Menu: * Bug Criteria:: Have you found a bug? * Bug Reporting:: How to report bugs  File: as.info, Node: Bug Criteria, Next: Bug Reporting, Up: Reporting Bugs Have you found a bug? ===================== If you are not sure whether you have found a bug, here are some guidelines: * If the assembler gets a fatal signal, for any input whatever, that is a `as' bug. Reliable assemblers never crash. * If `as' produces an error message for valid input, that is a bug. * If `as' does not produce an error message for invalid input, that is a bug. However, you should note that your idea of "invalid input" might be our idea of "an extension" or "support for traditional practice". * If you are an experienced user of assemblers, your suggestions for improvement of `as' are welcome in any case.  File: as.info, Node: Bug Reporting, Prev: Bug Criteria, Up: Reporting Bugs How to report bugs ================== A number of companies and individuals offer support for GNU products. If you obtained `as' from a support organization, we recommend you contact that organization first. You can find contact information for many support companies and individuals in the file `etc/SERVICE' in the GNU Emacs distribution. In any event, we also recommend that you send bug reports for `as' to `bug-gnu-utils@prep.ai.mit.edu'. The fundamental principle of reporting bugs usefully is this: *report all the facts*. If you are not sure whether to state a fact or leave it out, state it! Often people omit facts because they think they know what causes the problem and assume that some details do not matter. Thus, you might assume that the name of a symbol you use in an example does not matter. Well, probably it does not, but one cannot be sure. Perhaps the bug is a stray memory reference which happens to fetch from the location where that name is stored in memory; perhaps, if the name were different, the contents of that location would fool the assembler into doing the right thing despite the bug. Play it safe and give a specific, complete example. That is the easiest thing for you to do, and the most helpful. Keep in mind that the purpose of a bug report is to enable us to fix the bug if it is new to us. Therefore, always write your bug reports on the assumption that the bug has not been reported previously. Sometimes people give a few sketchy facts and ask, "Does this ring a bell?" Those bug reports are useless, and we urge everyone to *refuse to respond to them* except to chide the sender to report bugs properly. To enable us to fix the bug, you should include all these things: * The version of `as'. `as' announces it if you start it with the `--version' argument. Without this, we will not know whether there is any point in looking for the bug in the current version of `as'. * Any patches you may have applied to the `as' source. * The type of machine you are using, and the operating system name and version number. * What compiler (and its version) was used to compile `as'--e.g. "`gcc-2.7'". * The command arguments you gave the assembler to assemble your example and observe the bug. To guarantee you will not omit something important, list them all. A copy of the Makefile (or the output from make) is sufficient. If we were to try to guess the arguments, we would probably guess wrong and then we might not encounter the bug. * A complete input file that will reproduce the bug. If the bug is observed when the assembler is invoked via a compiler, send the assembler source, not the high level language source. Most compilers will produce the assembler source when run with the `-S' option. If you are using `gcc', use the options `-v --save-temps'; this will save the assembler source in a file with an extension of `.s', and also show you exactly how `as' is being run. * A description of what behavior you observe that you believe is incorrect. For example, "It gets a fatal signal." Of course, if the bug is that `as' gets a fatal signal, then we will certainly notice it. But if the bug is incorrect output, we might not notice unless it is glaringly wrong. You might as well not give us a chance to make a mistake. Even if the problem you experience is a fatal signal, you should still say so explicitly. Suppose something strange is going on, such as, your copy of `as' is out of synch, or you have encountered a bug in the C library on your system. (This has happened!) Your copy might crash and ours would not. If you told us to expect a crash, then when ours fails to crash, we would know that the bug was not happening for us. If you had not told us to expect a crash, then we would not be able to draw any conclusion from our observations. * If you wish to suggest changes to the `as' source, send us context diffs, as generated by `diff' with the `-u', `-c', or `-p' option. Always send diffs from the old file to the new file. If you even discuss something in the `as' source, refer to it by context, not by line number. The line numbers in our development sources will not match those in your sources. Your line numbers would convey no useful information to us. Here are some things that are not necessary: * A description of the envelope of the bug. Often people who encounter a bug spend a lot of time investigating which changes to the input file will make the bug go away and which changes will not affect it. This is often time consuming and not very useful, because the way we will find the bug is by running a single example under the debugger with breakpoints, not by pure deduction from a series of examples. We recommend that you save your time for something else. Of course, if you can find a simpler example to report *instead* of the original one, that is a convenience for us. Errors in the output will be easier to spot, running under the debugger will take less time, and so on. However, simplification is not vital; if you do not want to do this, report the bug anyway and send us the entire test case you used. * A patch for the bug. A patch for the bug does help us if it is a good one. But do not omit the necessary information, such as the test case, on the assumption that a patch is all we need. We might see problems with your patch and decide to fix the problem another way, or we might not understand it at all. Sometimes with a program as complicated as `as' it is very hard to construct an example that will make the program follow a certain path through the code. If you do not send us the example, we will not be able to construct one, so we will not be able to verify that the bug is fixed. And if we cannot understand what bug you are trying to fix, or why your patch should be an improvement, we will not install it. A test case will help us to understand. * A guess about what the bug is or what it depends on. Such guesses are usually wrong. Even we cannot guess right about such things without first using the debugger to find the facts.  File: as.info, Node: Acknowledgements, Next: Index, Prev: Reporting Bugs, Up: Top Acknowledgements **************** If you have contributed to `as' and your name isn't listed here, it is not meant as a slight. We just don't know about it. Send mail to the maintainer, and we'll correct the situation. Currently the maintainer is Ken Raeburn (email address `raeburn@cygnus.com'). Dean Elsner wrote the original GNU assembler for the VAX.(1) Jay Fenlason maintained GAS for a while, adding support for GDB-specific debug information and the 68k series machines, most of the preprocessing pass, and extensive changes in `messages.c', `input-file.c', `write.c'. K. Richard Pixley maintained GAS for a while, adding various enhancements and many bug fixes, including merging support for several processors, breaking GAS up to handle multiple object file format back ends (including heavy rewrite, testing, an integration of the coff and b.out back ends), adding configuration including heavy testing and verification of cross assemblers and file splits and renaming, converted GAS to strictly ANSI C including full prototypes, added support for m680[34]0 and cpu32, did considerable work on i960 including a COFF port (including considerable amounts of reverse engineering), a SPARC opcode file rewrite, DECstation, rs6000, and hp300hpux host ports, updated "know" assertions and made them work, much other reorganization, cleanup, and lint. Ken Raeburn wrote the high-level BFD interface code to replace most of the code in format-specific I/O modules. The original VMS support was contributed by David L. Kashtan. Eric Youngdale has done much work with it since. The Intel 80386 machine description was written by Eliot Dresselhaus. Minh Tran-Le at IntelliCorp contributed some AIX 386 support. The Motorola 88k machine description was contributed by Devon Bowen of Buffalo University and Torbjorn Granlund of the Swedish Institute of Computer Science. Keith Knowles at the Open Software Foundation wrote the original MIPS back end (`tc-mips.c', `tc-mips.h'), and contributed Rose format support (which hasn't been merged in yet). Ralph Campbell worked with the MIPS code to support a.out format. Support for the Zilog Z8k and Hitachi H8/300 and H8/500 processors (tc-z8k, tc-h8300, tc-h8500), and IEEE 695 object file format (obj-ieee), was written by Steve Chamberlain of Cygnus Support. Steve also modified the COFF back end to use BFD for some low-level operations, for use with the H8/300 and AMD 29k targets. John Gilmore built the AMD 29000 support, added `.include' support, and simplified the configuration of which versions accept which directives. He updated the 68k machine description so that Motorola's opcodes always produced fixed-size instructions (e.g. `jsr'), while synthetic instructions remained shrinkable (`jbsr'). John fixed many bugs, including true tested cross-compilation support, and one bug in relaxation that took a week and required the proverbial one-bit fix. Ian Lance Taylor of Cygnus Support merged the Motorola and MIT syntax for the 68k, completed support for some COFF targets (68k, i386 SVR3, and SCO Unix), added support for MIPS ECOFF and ELF targets, wrote the initial RS/6000 and PowerPC assembler, and made a few other minor patches. Steve Chamberlain made `as' able to generate listings. Hewlett-Packard contributed support for the HP9000/300. Jeff Law wrote GAS and BFD support for the native HPPA object format (SOM) along with a fairly extensive HPPA testsuite (for both SOM and ELF object formats). This work was supported by both the Center for Software Science at the University of Utah and Cygnus Support. Support for ELF format files has been worked on by Mark Eichin of Cygnus Support (original, incomplete implementation for SPARC), Pete Hoogenboom and Jeff Law at the University of Utah (HPPA mainly), Michael Meissner of the Open Software Foundation (i386 mainly), and Ken Raeburn of Cygnus Support (sparc, and some initial 64-bit support). Richard Henderson rewrote the Alpha assembler. Klaus Kaempf wrote GAS and BFD support for openVMS/Alpha. Several engineers at Cygnus Support have also provided many small bug fixes and configuration enhancements. Many others have contributed large or small bugfixes and enhancements. If you have contributed significant work and are not mentioned on this list, and want to be, let us know. Some of the history has been lost; we are not intentionally leaving anyone out. ---------- Footnotes ---------- (1) Any more details?