Document process for running cyrus components through a debugger like gdb

[brong]

From: Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems)
Bugzilla-Id: 3413
Version: 2.5.x (next)
Owner: Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems)

[brong]

From: Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems)

As per the title

[elliefm]

There's a "[gdb]" section of cassandane.ini which allows firing up service daemons in a debugger (technical note: "service daemons" are any programs which are based around master/service.c, and includes imapd, lmtpd, and a few others, but notably does not include the command line tools). The cassandane.ini.example in the cassandane repo contains examples and instructions.

When I'm trying to debug something in a service daemon I find it most useful to throw together a Cassandane test that tries to reproduce it, enable one of the [gdb] options as appropriate and go from there.

For programs that aren't service daemons, you have two options:

• If they've been installed, just run them with gdb. You might need to fiddle around with sudo depending on permissions.
• If they haven't been installed (and you're in the source/build tree), you need to run gdb from libtool in order for everything to fit together properly. e.g. libtool --mode=execute gdb imap/cyr_virusscan if you wanted to debug cyr_virusscan

[elliefm]

If you need to pass command line arguments to a tool you're debugging, you do this once you're in gdb with something like set args [...] before you run. (I'm not going to go into gdb at length, it's got its own documentation, but that seems like a helpful starting point to someone who's new.)

[nicolan]

Fixed!