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 # by sending e-mail to @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: Replace with the name of the package which has the bug. The second line of the message should say: Version: Replace 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 (not to the pseudo header with the Package field): 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: Replace 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: Replace with one or more of the available tags, as described in the developers' documentation. Separate multiple tags with commas, spaces, or both. 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 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 Debian bug tracking system Copyright © 1999 Darren O. Benham, 1997, 2003 nCipher Corporation Ltd, 1994-1997 Ian Jackson. _________________________________________________________________