[Alex Henrie]

2015-01-12 10:43 GMT-07:00 The Cheese <vasvadx at gmail.com>:
> Hi, I'm a newbie. I would really like to help with the development of Wine
> in any capacity I can. The thing is, I looked over the bugzilla and various
> ways to get the stacktrace, etc. However, finding the cause simply by
> looking at address calls and returns eludes me. Is there something which
> might help me get there faster, for eg: reading up on instruction sets on
> x86 chipsets etc? I've already looked over the winedev-guide. Thanks for any
> help.

Hi Cheese,

I just saw your message while cleaning out my old emails. It's great
to see new people interested in Wine!

There are lots of ways that you can debug without having expert
knowledge of the x86 instruction set:

- You can check the program's console output for suspicious messages.

- If the program worked in an older version of Wine, you can run a
regression test.

- You can try installing various DLLs from winetricks to see if any of
them resolves the problem.

- You can use Dependency Walker to determine which DLLs the program links to.

- You can enable debug channels to figure out which DLL functions are
being called, and look for suspicious patterns.

- You can read the source code of the functions that are being called
and look for anything that doesn't seem right.

- If the program is open source, you can read its source code to
figure out what it is doing and why.

Note that if you submit any patches to Wine, you will have to use your
real name. Good luck!

-Alex