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Debian wiki bugs portal. This portal covers all aspects of reporting and working on bugs in Debian.

The BTS (standing for the Bug Tracking System) is Debian's bug tracking system. It was created by the Debian Project for its own needs.

It provides the following functionality:

• Can be fully controlled via email

• Users do not need to authenticate or create an account to report bugs
• Users can subscribe to bugs and receive updates via email

• Web interface for viewing and filtering reported bugs (including to show those with patches, bugs already fixed).

• Bugs can be assigned, and marked as affecting, different packages

• Ability to mark bugs as having a different severity, from wishlist (feature requests) to critical (breaks the whole system)
• Developers can record which versions of a package are affected by a bug

• Users can define their own tags and categories to group bugs in different ways

Reporting bugs

The easiest way to report a bug to Debian is to use reportbug, which will guide you through the reporting process and ensure your bug report includes relevant parts of your system configuration.

When reporting a bug, please explain the issue clearly, including the following information:

• What are you trying to do?
• How can the problem be reproduced (actions, commands...)
• What is the expected behavior?
• What happens instead?
• Version of the software
• Version of Debian you are using

If you already know how to fix the bug, please include that as well. See also How to Report Bugs Effectively and BugReport.

If the bug affects all versions of the software and not just the version provided by Debian it is usually better to report it directly to the software's upstream (the people maintaining the software that Debian has packaged), as well as to Debian. This is because many debian developers will be reluctant to fix an issue unless the upstream developers plan to make the same change, and because the upstream is likely to better understand how to fix an issue. Consult the official upstream home page website of the software for information on how to report bugs upstream: you can usually find the upstream home page by running apt show <package> | grep Homepage.

Using the BTS

There is some, incomplete, documentation in Accessing the BTS and the following pages link to further information

From the web

• Use https://bugs.debian.org/PACKAGENAME to list bugs for a specific package

• Use https://bugs.debian.org/BUGNUMBER to access a specific bug report

From the command line

There are a couple of command line tools in Debian to help use the BTS

• reportbug - a command line tool for reporting bugs to Debian

• bts from the devscripts package is a command line tool to manipulate bugs

From email

• HowtoUseBTS and BTS/BugTag

• BTS/HowTo

• Official documentation of the mail interface: commands reference, control messages, request commands

Using the UDD

• Advanced bug search using UDD (the CGI script source can be a template for a customized local script, to be run against a public UDD instance)

Using SOAP

See DebbugsSoapInterface

Fixing bugs

Bug Triaging

• See BugTriage and BugReport/WorkingOn for how to work on fixing bugs

• Learn how to triage bugs, Solveig at DebConf18: (video)

Bug Squashing Parties

See BSP

Closing bugs

Bug reports can get closed in several ways:

• A package upload that contains a closes: #12345 in the changelog. When the package is accepted into the archive this triggers a mail to 12345-done@bugs.debian.org with Version: 1.2.3 in the first line of the mail. This will only start when the package in that version is in sync in unstable on all architectures and also in DebianTesting (if the bug affects testing).

• Manually, by sending a mail to bugnumber-done@bugs.debian.org with a Version: header field that claims the bug report to be fixed in that version. If the bug report is a non-issue (like, a false report) then the Version: line should not be added to the mail (this is needed for the BTS to be able to distinguish bugs fixed in a specific version and bugs that aren't really bugs).

Developing the BTS

• Bugs affecting the BTS: bugs.debian.org and debbugs

• Teams/Debbugs - the team responsible for the BTS

Talks about the BTS

• debbugs ­- Tips, Tricks and Hacks, Anthony Towns 15th June, 2005 (video, slides)

• Secret debian internals, Enrico Zini, 2007 at Fosdem : (video,slide)

Wiki pages

All wiki pages about working with bugs in Debian:

CategoryBugs | CategoryPortal