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, temporarily 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
Note
When starting with fresh settings as explained above, this implies clean logs and you won’t have to run through the following instructions when investigating a problem for the first time. Also, the Settings Path will match your
smartgit.settingsfrom above.
Before investigating a problem, restart SmartGit with clean logs:
- locate the Settings Path in the Help|About dialog
- shut down SmartGit
- from the sub-directory
logs/remove alllog.txt*files - restart SmartGit
Reproduce the problem
Once SmartGit has been restarted, immediately proceed with reproducing the problem. Once reproduced, shut down 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 in 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 shut down SmartGit again.
Now logs/log.txt.0 should contain DEBUG (or TRACE) lines for the specified key.