I recently had an issue where darktable suddenly started segfaulting. By temporarily moving my darktablerc file I was able to determine that the segfaults were caused by a bad darktablerc file. It was a long laborious trial-and-error process to determine which line in the 1386-line file was bad. (It was line 1004, plugins/lighttable/filtering/lastsort=14.) My question is: Is there a better way to debug darktablerc besides iterating through removing sections to narrow down where the bad line is? Of course this is assuming I don’t want to simply delete the whole file.
Halving. You make a backup. Remove the first half, retry. If still crashes, the problem is in the second half. Restore your backup, remove the 2nd half to confirm. Hopefully, it won’t crash.
Restore the original. Remove the 3rd quarter. If crashes, restore your backup, and remove the 4th quarter instead.
Iterate time this on eights, sixteenths etc.
You can also make some educated guesses, if, based on an error message or module usage triggering the crash, you have an idea where the fault is: e.g. remove all darkroom settings, or all lighttable settings, all module settings etc.
That may solve the problem for you, but not for others. It’s best to post the crash log, either here, or in a bug report on GitHub. Then the devs can actually fix the crash for everyone.
It may help the devs if you also post your darktablerc, with the offending part marked, as part of the bug report