Bug-buddy (included with GNOME) is the simplest way to report a bug in Evolution. However, if you prefer writing detailed bug reports in Bugzilla yourself, this guide is for you.
It's suggested that you first take a look at the Subversion Trunk version of Evolution, to see if the bug still exists in the latest codebase. If the bug still exists in the latest version of Evolution, the following software will help illuminate what is occuring (and will also give you more information to help make your bug reports to be more useful to the Evolution developers):
Starting Evolution from your terminal with some special environment variables causes Evolution to display more information on what it is currently doing.
The following is a list of variables and what each one tells Evolution to do:
It's easy to start Evolution with custom variables. One would simply run something like the following:
CAMEL_DEBUG=all evolution >& evo.log
Using Bugzilla is the best way to report bugs. An alternative method is to join the IRC chanel #evolution (on irc.gnome.org) and ask someone there. After talking to the person on IRC, you'll typically want to open a bug in Bugzilla anyway so that the issue can be tracked. (It's most likely that the people on IRC will tell you to report the bug in Bugzilla too.)
If Evolution crashes, and you can reproduce it, than start Evolution in a debuger, like so:
gdb evolution
Once gdb is running, you can do the following steps:
Including the debugging info acquired through the above method in a bug report in Bugzilla will enable the developers pinpoint where something is going wrong, hopefully making it easier to fix the bug in Evolution.
If you would like to find more about memory usage, or how to speed up Evolution, please view Valgrind's website.
The bug tracking system for Evolution resides at bugzilla.gnome.org.
To get a backtrace of a process, you can either directly run this process under gdb, or attach gdb to a running instance of the process. For getting a debug backtrace for evolution, you would be interested in these process-files.
You could also type 'continue' at the gdb prompt and proceed as usual and then press ctrl+c, to get the gdb prompt again.
You can debug the communications with your mail server with environment variable CAMEL_VERBOSE_DEBUG.
The server traffic will be logged to /tmp/camel.out file delimited by the words "sending:" and "receiving:". Certain information such as usernames and passwords, and most message content will be hidden or not printed.
From evolution 1.5.5 onwards, a simpler debug variable with more features has been added, CAMEL_DEBUG. For most cases, simply use CAMEL_DEBUG=all instead of CAMEL_VEBOSE_DEBUG=1.
You can debug the communications with GroupWise server with GROUPWISE_DEBUG environment variable. Evolution Data Server communicates with GroupWise server using SOAP over http for accessing calendar and contacts data. When Evolution Data Server is run with GROUPWISE_DEBUG set, the http headers and body (xml conent) of SOAP request/responses are printed to standard output.
Evolution process also communicates with GroupWise server during Novell GroupWise account setup. One can run evolution after setting the GROUPWISE_DEBUG in the same manner described above to debug any Novell GroupWise account setup related problems.
You can debug the communications with Exchange server using the E2K_DEBUG environment variable. Exchange connector runs as a separate process [evolution-exchange-storage]. You can run evolution-exchange-storage with E2K_DEBUG set to a value from 1 to 5:
You can also append 'm' to E2K_DEBUG to see mail stub debugging: it will print out everything read to or written from the stub socket. (You can set E2K_DEBUG=m on evolution itself as well, to see the conversation from the other side.)
Follow these steps to create a log file containing the webdav traffic.