Translation(s): English - Português (Brasil)


Introduction

The purpose of a bug report is to improve the stable and testing Debian Distributions.

You send a bug report to help the maintainer improve the package, not to receive help from them.

You should check to see if your bug report has already been filed before submitting it.

If you want to know how to report a bug see : http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting

The purpose of a bug report

As it is written in : http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Replying-to-Mail

   The main purpose of bug reports is to help you contribute to the community
   by improving the next version of the program. Many of the people who report bugs
   don't realise this-they think that the point is for you to help them individually.
   Some will ask you to focus on that instead of on making the program better.
   If you comply with their wishes, you will have been distracted from the job
   of maintaining the program.

The purpose of bug reports in Debian can be found in the Debian Social Contract :

Time limitations

You must keep in mind that maintainers receive a lot of bug reports, and have limited time to spare on Debian. Their priority is to :

  1. package a new upstream release that fixes a lot of bugs
  2. fix a nicely reported bug with a reproducible and a well-identified cause

They don't have time to investigate dubious bug report.

Some interesting examples

Bug reports are used by the maintainers

If a bug occurs

Before sending a bug report:

If you want to send a bug report:

If you need a service

Debian has a list of consultants. If you need paid support for Debian, you can ask them.


CategoryBugs | CategoryRedundant: merge with BTS and other pages