Initially, a bug report is submitted by a user as an ordinary mail
message to debian-bugs@pixar.com. This will then be
given a number, acknowledged to the user, and forwarded to the
debian-devel list.
The Subject line will have
Bug#nnn: added, and the
Reply-To will be modified to include
debian-bugs@pixar.com.
A developer who sees a bug on debian-devel and takes responsibility
for it should hit Reply in their favourite mailreader, and then edit
the To field to include debian-bugs-done as
well as or instead of the other addresses which are present
(debian-bugs and the address of original submitter of the
problem report).
The developers' Subject line should look like
Bug#nnn: or Re:
Bug#nnn:, which will allow the script
to mark that bug as processed.
Whenever a message is received at debian-bugs-done with a
Subject looking like either of those the corresponding bug will be
marked as done, and messages confirming this will be sent to the
original submitter of the bug report and to the person marking it as
done. The message will not be forwarded to
debian-devel by default - if this is desired the person
marking the bug as done should include debian-devel in
their To field.
Anything that arrives at debian-bugs-done without
Bug#nn or Re: Bug#nnn
at the start of the Subject will be silently ignored. This is to
avoid confusing users who accidentally send messages to it.
If a developer wishes to reply to a bug report without marking the bug
as done they may simply reply to the message. Their reply will (by
default) go to debian-bugs and to the original submitter
of the bug report. The bug tracking system will file the reply reply
with the rest of the logs for that bug report and forward it to
debian-devel. The bug will not be marked as done.
There is no way to "reopen" a closed bug report - if this is required a new bug report should be created.
Every Friday a list of outstanding bug reports is posted to
debian-devel; every Tuesday a list of bug reports that
have gone unanswered too long is posted.
Quiet processing of bug reports
It is possible to get the bug tracking system not to forward your
messages to debian-bugs on to debian-devel.
To do this you need to add this line to your message's mail header
(not to the psuedo header with the Package field):
X-Debian-PR: quietThis will cause it not to send the message on; the fact that you have done this will be noted in the acknowledgement message you get. The message will still be filed, and assigned a bug number if it doesn't already have one.
debian-devel. When this happens the
Package: secondary header field may become mandatory - at
the moment omitting it just produces a warning message.
Would anyone like to write a bug reporting utility ? It need only be
capable of prompting for the details in question and sending the
message to debian-bugs-done. It would be nice to have a
version which runs on Linux and uses the dpkg databases
to find out which version of which package a particular program or
file comes from.