Home / SmartGit / HowTos / Debugging

Debugging

General advices/preparations

Always try to investigate problems with a fresh SmartGit setup:

• on Windows, use the Portable bundle: https://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/download/
• on macOS and Linux, temporary use a new smartgit.settings directory

Why?

SmartGit has plenty of Preferences options and even more Low-Level Properties which may sometimes affect the behavior of operations in non-obvious ways. This is especially true if the behavior you are experiencing is unexpected and/or looks like a bug.

Clean Logs

Before investigating a problem, restart SmartGit with clean logs:

• locate the Settings Path in the Help|About dialog
• shutdown SmartGit
• from sub-directory logs/ remove all log.txt* files
• restart SmartGit

Reproduce the problem

Once SmartGit has been restarted, immediately proceed with reproducing the problem. Once reproduced, shutdown SmartGit again.

Send results

When sending logs to us, make sure they are compressed either with ZIP or 7z. This prevents the logs from becoming inlined into the email. Include the stripped down settings (see above), if the problem isn’t reproducible with clean settings.

Strip down settings

If the problem is not reproducible with fresh settings, try to copy the settings from your main installation over to the new settings area. This should make the problem reproducible again. Now start to strip down the settings as much as necessary (e.g. to get rid of possibly sensitive information, especially the passwords file). Most crashes will be preserved as long as preferences.yml is left untouched. Once the settings are stripped down enough, compress them and include them with the logs (see below).

Enabling debug logging for certain keys

To enable debug logging for a certain key logging.foo.bar, first decide the log-level – whether it should be fine (DEBUG) or as fine as possible TRACE. Usually SmartGit support will tell you. After that add the corresponding line to smartgit.properties (in the Settings directory, see Installation and Files). Depending on the log-level this will be either:

DEBUG logging

logging.foo.bar=DEBUG

Or:

TRACE logging

logging.foo.bar=TRACE

After that, restart SmartGit and repeat the operation for which debug logging should be collected and shutdown SmartGit again.

Now logs/log.txt.0 should contain DEBUG (or TRACE) lines for the specified key.