Emacs crashes, smtpmail-send-it and gdb

[Tim Cross]

Hi All,

hoping someone can point me to a concise HOWTO on using gdb to debug emacs crashes. I've not needed to work at this level since the mid 90s and apart from having forgotten more than I remember, things have progressed somewhat. Like everyone else, I'm pressed for time and just want to try and narrow down the scope of my current issue enough to do a decent bug report. 

The Problem: Since upgrading to the latest BZR sources for emacs 24 on Monday, I've experienced multiple hard crashes when sending email. This has occured with boht VM and Mew. All I get is emacs suddenly crashing and a note on the console that says 

Fatal Error (6)Aborted

This is the GTK+ version running under Linux (32 bit). The crashes occur when I send the mail message. Both mail clients use smtpmail-send-it to connect to a local smarthost for mail dispatching. The problem does not happen every time you send mail, but it is quite frequent. I've not yet been able to narrow down more precise information about what triggers the problem. 

Objective: Use GDB to try and get some clue as to where the problem is and hopefully allow me to identify a recipe that will reproduce the problem so that I can log a meaingful bug report that will allow someone more knowledge than me to reproduce the problem and fix it. 

What I'm hoping for is a web link or something that will let me get things setup fast. I'm assuming it may be necessary to rebuild emacs with appropriate debugging support, make some system changes to allow core file generation and run a couple of basic gdb commands that may create a meaningful trace or identify the section of code where the problem occurs. While it may seem otherwise, I don't think I'm completely useless here - Just out of touch (last time I did this, core files were the sort of thing that just got created when a program crashed and a common cause of filesystems running out of space@). 

All suggestions/pointers appreciated.

thanks,

Tim