O Monks,

I have a little minimalistic calendar app, which is starting to be fairly popular (included in Ubuntu's apt-get repository, people are helping me with internationalization, ...). But there's one really strange thing, which is that I keep getting reports from Red Hat users that it doesn't run correctly on their systems. Now this is extremely strange, because it's 100% pure perl, and the only module it uses is Getopt::Long. These people seem to be running fairly modern versions of everything (e.g., Red Hat 9 and perl 5.8.0). Not only that, but the problem seems to be in parsing the input file, which just involves some straightforward regexing. I wouldn't have been quite so surprised if there had been a distro-dependent problem relating to time and date functions, but that doesn't seem to be the case!

Does anyone have any bright ideas on how to debug a platform-dependent problem like this? The only ideas I've been able to come up with don't seem all that great:

  1. Find someone local who has a Red Hat machine I can sit down at. (I don't know anybody who does.)
  2. Install Red Hat (or one of the free-as-in-beer clones) on a machine I own. (Argh, what a hassle!)
  3. Find someone who's willing to give me ssh access to a Red Hat machine. (I don't know anybody who'd be willing to, and if they didn't know me they'd be taking a risk by giving an account to a stranger. The code can be run without root privileges, but still...)
  4. Find a bootable Red Hat CD a la Knoppix. (Problems: I don't know if such a thing exists, and don't these things usually come up configured so that you can't access your HD's file system?)

Any suggestions?

In reply to approaches to debugging a platform-dependant bug by bcrowell2

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