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How to report a bug in Debian
Important things to note before sending
Please don't report multiple unrelated bugs - especially ones in
different packages - in a single bug report. It makes our lives much
easier if you send separate reports.
You should check if your bug report has already been filed by someone
else before submitting it. Lists of currently outstanding bugs are
available on the World Wide Web and elsewhere - see other documents
for details. You can submit your comments to an existing bug report
#<number> by sending e-mail to <number>@bugs.debian.org
If you can't seem to determine which package contains the problem,
please send e-mail to the Debian user mailing list asking for advice.
If your problem doesn't relate just to one package but some general
Debian service, there are several pseudo-packages or even mailing
lists that you can use to relay your message to us instead.
If you'd like to send a copy of your bug report to additional
recipients (such as mailing lists), you shouldn't use the usual e-mail
headers, but a different method, described below.
Sending the bug report using an automatic bug report tool
The reportbug program can ease filing bugs by guiding you through the
bug reporting process step by step. The querybts tool, available from
the same package as reportbug, provides a convenient text-based
interface to the bug tracking system.
Emacs users can also use the debian-bug command provided by the
debian-el package. When called with M-x debian-bug, it will ask for
all necessary information in a similar way to reportbug.
Sending the bug report via e-mail
Send email to submit@bugs.debian.org, as described below.
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!
You need to put a pseudo-header at the start of the body of the
message. That means that the first line of the message body should
say:
Package: <something>
Replace <something> with the name of the package which has the bug.
The second line of the message should say:
Version: <something>
Replace <something> with the version of the package. Please don't
include any text here other than the version itself, as the bug
tracking system relies on this field to work out which releases are
affected by the bug.
You need to supply a correct Package line in the pseudo-header in
order for the bug tracking system to deliver the message to the
package's maintainer. See this example for information on how to find
this information.
The pseudo-header fields should start at the very start of their
lines.
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.
* The versions of any packages on which the buggy package depends.
* What kernel version you're using (type uname -a), your shared C
library (type ls -l /lib/libc.so.6 or dpkg -s libc6 | grep
^Version), and any other details about your Debian system, if it
seems appropriate. For example, if you had a problem with a Perl
script, you would want to provide the version of the `perl' binary
(type perl -v or dpkg -s perl | grep ^Version:).
* Appropriate details of the hardware in your system. If you're
reporting a problem with a device driver please list all the
hardware in your system, as problems are often caused by IRQ and
I/O address conflicts.
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.).
For more advice on how to help the developers solve your problem,
please read How to Report Bugs Effectively.
Example
A bug report, with mail header, looks something like this:
To: submit@bugs.debian.org
From: diligent@testing.linux.org
Subject: Hello says `goodbye'
Package: hello
Version: 1.3-16
When I invoke `hello' without arguments from an ordinary shell
prompt it prints `goodbye', rather than the expected `hello, world'.
Here is a transcript:
$ hello
goodbye
$ /usr/bin/hello
goodbye
$
I suggest that the output string, in hello.c, be corrected.
I am using Debian GNU/Linux 2.2, kernel 2.2.17-pre-patch-13
and libc6 2.1.3-10.
Sending copies of bug reports to other addresses
Sometimes it is necessary to send a copy of a bug report to somewhere
else besides debian-bugs-dist 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.debian.org 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-Debbugs-CC header. Add a line
like this to your message's mail header:
X-Debbugs-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-Debbugs-CC line as well as to
debian-bugs-dist.
Avoid sending such copies to the addresses of other bug reports, as
they will be caught by the checks that prevent mail loops. There is
relatively little point in using X-Debbugs-CC for this anyway, as the
bug number added by that mechanism will just be replaced by a new one;
use an ordinary CC header instead.
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 line like this one in the
pseudo-header:
Severity: <severity>
Replace <severity> with one of the available severity levels, as
described in the developers' documentation.
Assigning tags
You can set tags on a bug as you are reporting it. For example, if you
are including a patch with your bug report, you may wish to set the
patch tag. This is not required, however, and the developers will set
tags on your report as and when it is appropriate.
To set tags, put a line like this one in the pseudo-header:
Tags: <tags>
Replace <tags> with one or more of the available tags, as described in
the developers' documentation. Separate multiple tags with commas,
spaces, or both.
Other pseudo headers (primarily of interest to package maintainers)
Forwarded: foo@example.com
will mark the newly submitted bug as forwarded to foo@example.com. See
Recording that you have passed on a bug report in the developers'
documentation for details.
Owner: foo@example.com
will indicate that foo@example.com is now responsible for fixing this
bug. See Changing bug ownership in the developers' documentation for
details.
Source: foopackage
the equivalent of Package: for bugs present in the source package of
foopackage; for most bugs in most packages you don't want to use this
option.
Finally, if your MUA doesn't allow you to edit the headers, you can
set the various X-Debbugs- headers in the pseudo-headers.
Different submission addresses (minor or mass bug reports)
If a bug report is minor, for example, a documentation typo or a
trivial build problem, please adjust the severity appropriately and
send it to maintonly@bugs instead of submit@bugs. maintonly will
forward the report to the package maintainer only, it won't forward it
to the BTS mailing lists.
If you're submitting many reports at once, you should definitely use
maintonly@bugs so that you don't cause too much redundant traffic on
the BTS mailing lists. Before submitting many similar bugs you may
also want to post a summary on debian-bugs-dist.
If wish to report a bug to the bug tracking system that's already been
sent to the maintainer, you can use quiet@bugs. Bugs sent to
quiet@bugs will not be forwarded anywhere, only filed.
When you use different submission addresses, the bug tracking system
will set the Reply-To of any forwarded message so that the replies
will by default be processed in the same way as the original report.
That means that, for example, replies to maintonly will go to
nnn-maintonly@bugs instead of nnn@bugs, unless of course one overrides
this manually.
Acknowledgements
Normally, the bug tracking system will return an acknowledgement to
you by e-mail when you report a new bug or submit additional
information to an existing bug. If you want to suppress this
acknowledgement, include an X-Debbugs-No-Ack header in your e-mail
(the contents of this header do not matter; however, it must be in the
mail header and not in the pseudo-header with the Package field). If
you report a new bug with this header, you will need to check the web
interface yourself to find the bug number.
Note that this header will not suppress acknowledgements from the
control@bugs mailserver, since those acknowledgements may contain
error messages which should be read and acted upon.
Bug reports against unknown packages
If the bug tracking system doesn't know who the maintainer of the
relevant package is it'll forward the report to debian-bugs-dist even
if maintonly was used.
When sending to maintonly@bugs or nnn-maintonly@bugs 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 service to (re)assign the report
appropriately first if it isn't correct already.
Using dpkg to find the package and version for the report
If you are reporting a bug in a command, you can find out which
package installed it by using dpkg --search. You can find out which
version of a package you have installed by using dpkg --list or dpkg
--status.
For example:
$ which apt-get
/usr/bin/apt-get
$ type apt-get
apt-get is /usr/bin/apt-get
$ dpkg --search /usr/bin/apt-get
apt: /usr/bin/apt-get
$ dpkg --list apt
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Description
+++-==============-==============-============================================
ii apt 0.3.19 Advanced front-end for dpkg
$ dpkg --status apt
Package: apt
Status: install ok installed
Priority: standard
Section: base
Installed-Size: 1391
Maintainer: APT Development Team <deity@lists.debian.org>
Version: 0.3.19
Replaces: deity, libapt-pkg-doc (<< 0.3.7), libapt-pkg-dev (<< 0.3.7)
Provides: libapt-pkg2.7
Depends: libapt-pkg2.7, libc6 (>= 2.1.2), libstdc++2.10
Suggests: dpkg-dev
Conflicts: deity
Description: Advanced front-end for dpkg
This is Debian's next generation front-end for the dpkg package manager.
It provides the apt-get utility and APT dselect method that provides a
simpler, safer way to install and upgrade packages.
.
APT features complete installation ordering, multiple source capability
and several other unique features, see the Users Guide in
/usr/doc/apt/guide.text.gz
_________________________________________________________________
Debian BTS administrators <owner@bugs.debian.org>
Debian bug tracking system
Copyright © 1999 Darren O. Benham, 1997, 2003 nCipher Corporation Ltd,
1994-1997 Ian Jackson.
_________________________________________________________________
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