Debugging XEmacs

This page is trying to lower the entry level for anybody who wants to debug problems with the installation or operation of XEmacs.

While the diagnosis of a flat tire is fairly intuitive (you just rotate all four tires around the car and observe whether the fault moves with it), debugging problems with XEmacs can be frustrating to beginners. This is because XEmacs is not just another editor, it's better thought of as an operating environment or system.

Following are the most obvious resources to get started with the debugging of XEmacs. Please report any problems you may have to access these resources.

XEmacs FAQ

Installation and Trouble Shooting

Windows Installation (Windows, Cygwin, MinGW)

XEmacs Mailing Lists

Report or search problems on UNIX

Submit or search patches for XEmacs

Reporting Bugs

XEmacs now has an issue tracking system issue tracking system, based on the Roundup issue tracker designed by Ka-Ping Yee and implemented by Richard Jones.

Before reporting a new bug, please check the issue tracker for similar issues (which may be closed, especially if you are using a version of XEmacs which is not current).

You can create a new issue directly in your browser by registering as a user on the issue tracker. If you would prefer to report by email (which does not require preregistration but may involve some delays), please install the latest net-utils package (>=1.23) from http://ftp.xemacs.org/packages/ or a mirror and then use one of these options:

Help->Send Bug Report...
M-x report-xemacs-bug

This will tell us enough about your XEmacs installation so that we should be able to help you.

On some operating systems, especially some current Linux distributions, core files have been disabled by default. Typing ulimit -c unlimited in the shell before starting XEmacs from it may help you in getting a core file.

If XEmacs does not build or start up, or you don't have a working net-utils package, then please send mail to xemacs-beta@xemacs.org by other means as plain text (MIME attachments are OK, but please don't send HTML mail).