How to report a bug in Mandrake

Before to proced

If you have a hardware problem or a configuration problem, you should ask for help in the mailing lists. If you don't have a clue how to solve the problem or have a general (unprecise) problem, post to bugs@linux-mandrake.com. Otherwise continue to read.

Please don't report several unrelated bugs - especially ones in different packages - in one message. Also, please don't crosspost to any mailing lists or recipients (for details of how to do this right, see below).

Lists of currently-outstanding bugs are available on the World Wide Web and elsewhere - see other documents for details.

You should put a pseudo-header at the start of the body of the message, with the Package: and Version: lines giving the name and version of the package which has the bug. (The pseudo-header fields must start at the very start of their lines, and the bug system does not currently understand them if they're buried in MIMEd or PGPd mail.) See below for further requirements.

Example

Send your message at submit@bugs.linux-mandrake.com

A bug report, with mail header, looks something like this:

  To: submit@bugs.linux-mandrake.com
  From: diligent@testing.linux.org
  Subject: Hello says `goodbye'

  Package: hello
  Version: 1.3-2

  When I invoke `hello' without arguments from an ordinary shell
  prompt it prints `goodbye', rather than the expected `hello, world'.
  Here is a transcript:

  goodbye

usr/bin/hello
  goodbye
   suggest that the output string, in hello.c, be corrected.

  I am using Debian 1.1, kernel version 1.3.99.15z
  and libc 5.2.18.3.2.1.3-beta.

Please include in your report:

The exact and complete text of any error messages printed or logged. This is very important!
Exactly what you typed or did to demonstrate the problem.
A description of the incorrect behaviour: exactly what behaviour you were expecting, and what you observed. A transcript of an example session is a good way of showing this.
A suggested fix, or even a patch, if you have one.
Details of the configuration of the program with the problem. Include the complete text of its configuration files.

Include any detail that seems relevant - you are in very little danger of making your report too long by including too much information. If they are small please include in your report any files you were using to reproduce the problem (uuencoding them if they may contain odd characters etc.).

Of course, like any email, you should include a clear, descriptive Subject line in your main mail header. The subject you give will be used as the initial bug title in the tracking system, so please try to make it informative !

Sending copies of bug reports to other addresses

Sometimes it is necessary to send a copy of a bug report to somewhere else besides the mailing list and the package maintainer, which is where they are normally sent.

You could do this by CC'ing your bug report to the other address(es), but then the other copies would not have the bug report number put in the Reply-To field and the Subject line. When the recipients reply they will probably preserve the submit@bugs.linux-mandrake.com entry in the header and have their message filed as a new bug report. This leads to many duplicated reports.

The right way to do this is to use the X-Mandrake-CC header. Add a line like this to your message's mail header (not to the psuedo header with the Package field):

 X-Mandrake-CC: other-list@cosmic.edu

This will cause the bug tracking system to send a copy of your report to the address(es) in the X-Mandrake-CC line as well as to any mailing list.

This feature can often be combined usefully with mailing quiet - see below.

Severity levels

If a report is of a particularly serious bug, or is merely a feature request that, you can set the severity level of the bug as you report it. This is not required, however, and the developers will assign an appropriate severity level to your report if you do not.

To assign a severity level put a Severity: severity line in the psuedo-header, together with Package and Version. The severity levels available are described in the developers' documentation.

Not forwarding to the mailing list - minor bug reports

If a bug report is minor (for example, a documentation typo or other trivial build problem), or you're submitting many reports at once, send them to maintonly@bugs.linux-mandrake.com or quiet@bugs.linux-mandrake.com. maintonly will send the report on to the package maintainer (provided you supply a correct Package line in the pseudo-header and the maintainer is known), and quiet will not forward it anywhere at all but only file it as a bug (useful if, for example, you are submitting many similar bugs and want to post only a summary).

If you do this the bug system will set the Reply-To of any forwarded message so that replies will by default be processed in the same way as the original report.

Unknown packages or bugs with no `Package` key

If the bug tracking system doesn't know who the maintainer of the relevant package is it'll forward the report to the mailing list even if maintonly was used.

When sending to maintonly@bugs.linux-mandrake.com or nnn-maintonly@bugs.linux-mandrake.com you should make sure that the bug report is assigned to the right package, by putting a correct Package at the top of an original submission of a report, or by using the control@bugs.linux-mandrake.com service to (re)assign the report appropriately first if it isn't correct already.

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