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reportbug is a tool designed to make the reporting of bug(s) in Debian and its derived distributions, relatively painless.

This package provides access to the Debian Bug Tracking System, which can be used for both reporting, and researching bugs, by a number of interfaces, including email, web, and command-line utilities.

Installation

Install the reportbug package.

Usage

There is also a robot at control@bugs.debian.org that expects specially-crafted control messages for the Debian Bug Tracking System.

Configuration

Using your normal mail client

This option is available since reportbug 7.7.0 and Debian bullseye.

/!\ This option may be fragile or unreliable so please test it before using it for real bug reports, please read the documentation for more details first.

Ensure you have configured your desired email client in your desktop preferences. This will be different for each desktop. In GNOME, go to "Settings" and select "Default Applications" then "Mail" and choose your desired client.

Install the xdg-utils package to make the xdg-email command available.

apt install xdg-utils

Set the mua option in your ~/.reportbugrc file to xdg-email.

mua xdg-email

Now whenever you report a bug, reportbug will open the bug report template in compose windows of your normal email client and you can send the mail via your normal email client mail sending interface.

Using a specific mail client

/!\ This option may be fragile or unreliable so please test it before using it for real bug reports, please read the documentation for more details first.

If your reportbug is too old to use xdg-email or if you want to use a different email client for sending reportbug mail than your desktop email client, or if xdg-email's handling of your email client is buggy and so you want to use reportbug's handling of your email client instead, you can switch by setting the mua option in your ~/.reportbugrc file to select the right one:

mua thunderbird

The currently available settings for the mua option include: mutt neomutt mh nmh gnus claws-mail alpine pine evolution kmail thunderbird sylpheed xdg-email xdg-email.

To find out the available mua options for the version of reportbug that you are using, run this command in a terminal:

sed -n '/^MUA/,/^]/p' /usr/lib/python*/*/reportbug/mailer.py

Using the Debian bug report SMTP server

/!\ The Debian bug report mail server should only be used in certain situations since it has some limitations. Please read the documentation before using this option.

reportbug is often used on systems with an installed Mail Transport Agent (MTA), like exim, or sendmail; however, you can edit the configuration file; and send reports using the Debian bug report mail server instead.

  1. Run reportbug --configure as your normal user. This creates a ~/.reportbugrc file that stores all the configurations.

  2. Follow the instructions and when asked Do you have a 'mail transport agent' (MTA) configured, choose No

  3. Then enter nothing for the SMTP host; reportbug will configure the Debian bug report mail server (reportbug.debian.org) as your SMTP host.

Using a custom SMTP server

reportbug is often used on systems with an installed Mail Transport Agent (MTA), like exim, or sendmail; however, you can edit the configuration file; and send reports using any available mail server. Here, is an example using a GMail account:

  1. Run reportbug --configure as your normal user. This creates a ~/.reportbugrc file that stores all the configurations.

  2. Follow the instructions and when asked Do you have a 'mail transport agent' (MTA) configured, choose No

  3. Then enter the SMTP host for gmail: smtp.gmail.com:587

  4. For the user name enter: <username>@gmail.com

  5. For the question Does your SMTP host require TLS authentication?, choose Yes

If you have set up Google's two-factor authentication for your GMail account, you can create an application-specific password to use with reportbug.

Warning: The submit@bugs.debian.org procmail has a rule that silently discards emails from postmaster@<domain>. Combined with the fact that Google G-Suite changes the MAIL FROM address to postmaster@<domain> when the original MAIL FROM is from outside your domain makes your bugs to be silently discarded.

Troubleshooting

Warning: unsupported locale setting: This error relates to Locale configuration. To workaround this problem, invoke the program as LANG=C reportbug

See also


CategoryBugs | CategorySoftware