

Developers' information regarding the bug processing system

The system doesn't (yet) route problem reports to the appropriate
developer. Rather, its intent is to help ensure that they don't go
unanswered.

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: quiet
This 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.

Future plans

At some point the bug reporting system may be changed to send bug
reports directly to the developer in question, rather than to
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.
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Other pages:
   * Instructions for reporting bugs.
   * Summary of outstanding bug reports, sorted by package.
   * Summary of outstanding bug reports, sorted by number.
   * Full list of outstanding and recent bug reports.
   * Debian GNU/Linux FAQ.
   * Archives of the Debian mailings lists.
   * Accessing the bug tracking logs.
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Ian Jackson / iwj10@thor.cam.ac.uk . 2nd May 1995.
