Hello! I would like to know if there are guidelines for bug reporting: I use debian unstable, and I find bugs, but I don't report most of them for many reasons.
I've never discussed these reasons with anyone. Now I would like to. I identified until now three kind of such unreported bugs: - Evident bugs I work mainly offline, so I don't have constant access to bugs.debian.org, and usually can't know when a bug has already been reported. When I find a bug in a package that is likely to already have been reported, I don't do it to avoid the possibility of flooding the bug database with reduntant reports. An example of this is when tar changed behaviour of the 'I' switch, or when a package can't be upgraded due to missing dependancies (like glademm, erlang and wordtrans are now), or when a package keeps redoing the same debconf questions on most updates. I only report these bugs when I see the problem persisting after a week or two. Should I always report it, instead? - Pedantic bugs Sometimes I notice something that should be different, but I don't know if it is to be considered as a bug, and I don't report it. For example, packages like skipstone, or powermanga or lxdoom appear in the Debian menus but not in the Gnome menus (is there a policy for Gnome menus?), or alsa doesn't load oss-emulation modules on demand with kernel 2.4.0+devfs (are packages supposed to correctly cope with devfs?) Should I be on the safe side and risk reporting a non-bug, or should I be on the other safe side and risk non-reporting a bug? - Non-Debian small bugs Sometimes I find small bugs that are clearly to be reported upstream, like wrong i18n translations (many, many, many of them), usability quirks or even usability suggestions, that I don't report upstream because I can't quickly find the address of the right person, and there's not an handy tool like `bug' for them, or there is, but is online, or there is, offline, but I don't know how to launch it, because every program has its own. It would be very handy to file a `whishlist' bug to the Debian BTS, knowing they are eventually reported upstream, but I don't do it to avoid flooding the BTS with non-debian-related items. Could the Debian BTS be used as a proxy service to upstream mantainers (considering that with debian-native packages it already is supposed to collect these kind of reports anyway) or we should wait for the development of a different common bug reporting system for such little issues? I would like to hear your opinion on this behaviours, to get out of Doubt into The Right Way (TM) to report bugs. Bye! Enrico -- GPG public key available on finger -l [EMAIL PROTECTED]
