advice in debugging a new port

[cremes.devlist at mac.com]

On May 10, 2007, at 1:21 PM, cremes.devlist at mac.com wrote:

> Okay, the title is a bit of a lie; the port succeeds in building  
> and installing.
>
> I'm working on a new port for transcode [1] and am running into a  
> problem. The port will be pulling HEAD from cvs so I am fully aware  
> that the problem I am seeing right now could be related to  
> instability in the trunk.
>
> Again, I have the port successfully building and installing.  
> However, executing the binary to do even simple operations results  
> in a hang. The weird thing is that the command will execute to  
> completion and then hang on exit.
>
> For example, if I execute 'transcode --version' it successfully  
> prints its version info and then hangs. I can also issue a command  
> to transcode a movie from mpeg2 to h.264 which results in a good  
> clean file, but it hangs during exit.
>
> Is there a tracing facility on OSX I can use to track down this  
> problem? Most of my coding experience is IOKit in-kernel so I'm not  
> really good at this userland stuff. Thanks for any help or pointers.

For anyone wondering, the answers were 'ktrace,' 'kdump,' and 'gdb.'

cr