Developers' information regarding the bug processing system
Initially, a bug report is submitted by a user as an ordinary mail
message to submit@bugs.debian.org. This will then be given a number,
acknowledged to the user, and forwarded to the debian-devel list. If
the submitter included a Package line listing a package with a known
maintainer the maintainer will get a copy too.
The Subject line will have Bug#nnn: added, and the Reply-To will be
set to include both the submitter of the report and
nnn@bugs.debian.org.
Closing bug reports
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 say nnn-done@bugs.debian.org instead of nnn@bugs
(nnn-close is provided as an alias for nnn-done).
The address of the original submitter of the bug report will be
included in the default To field, because the bug system included it
in the Reply-To.
`Done' messages are not automatically forwarded to the mailing list,
so it may sometimes be worthwhile including the debian-devel mailing
list if the other developers are likely to be interested.
The person closing the bug and the person who submitted it will each
get a notification about the change in status of the report.
Followup messages
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 nnn@bugs and to the original submitter of the bug
report. The bug tracking system will file the 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.
If you wish to send a followup message which is not appropriate for
debian-devel you can do so by sending it to nnn-quiet@bugs or
nnn-maintonly@bugs, which only file it (not forwarding it anywhere)
and send it on only to the maintainer of the package in question,
respectively.
Do _not_ use the `reply to all recipients' or `followup' feature of
your mailer unless you intend to edit down the recipients
substantially. In particular, don't send a followup message both to
nnn@bugs.debian.org and to submit@bugs.debian.org, because the bug
system will then get two copies of it and each one will be forwarded
to debian-devel separately.
Recording that you have passed on a bug report
When a developer forwards a bug report to the developer of the general
source package from which the Debian package is derived, they should
note this in the bug tracking system as follows:
Make sure that the To field of your message to the author to has only
the author(s) address(es) in it; put both the person who reported the
bug and nnn-forwarded@bugs.debian.org in the CC field.
Ask the author to preserve the CC to nnn-forwarded@bugs when they
reply, so that the bug tracking system will file their reply with the
original report.
When the bug tracking system gets a message at nnn-forwarded it will
mark the relevant bug as having been forwarded to the address(es) in
the To field of the message it gets.
You can also manipulate the `forwarded to' information by sending
messages to control@bugs.
Summary postings to debian-devel
Every Friday a list of outstanding bug reports is posted to
debian-devel, sorted by age of report; every Tuesday a list of bug
reports that have gone unanswered too long is posted, sorted by
package maintainer.
If the maintainer of a package is listed incorrectly this is usually
because the maintainer has changed recently, and the new maintainer
hasn't yet uploaded a new version of the package with a changed
Maintainer control file field. This will be fixed when the package is
uploaded; alternatively, there is an override file which the
distribution maintainers can edit to record the change in maintainer,
for example if a rebuild and reupload of the package is not expected
to be needed soon. Contact iwj-mastercron@master.debian.org for
changes to the override file.
Reopening, reassigning and manipulating bugs
It is possible to reassign bug reports to other packages, to reopen
erroneously-closed ones, to modify the information saying to where, if
anywhere, a bug report has been forwarded, to change the titles of
reports and to merge and unmerge bug reports. This is done by sending
mail to control@bugs.debian.org.
The format of these messages is described in another document
available on the World Wide Web or in the file
bug-maint-mailcontrol.txt. A plain text version can also be obtained
by mailing the word help to the server at the address above.
More-or-less obsolete subject-scanning feature
Messages that arrive at submit or bugs whose Subject starts Bug#nnn
will be treated as having been sent to nnn@bugs. This is both for
backwards compatibility with mail forwarded from the old addresses,
and to catch followup mail sent to submit by mistake (for example, by
using reply to all recipients).
A similar scheme operates for maintonly, done, quiet and forwarded,
which treat mail arriving with a Subject tag as having been sent to
the corresponding nnn-whatever@bugs address.
Messages arriving at plain forwarded and done - ie, with no bug report
number in the address - and without a bug number in the Subject will
be filed under `junk' and kept for a few weeks, but otherwise ignored.
Future plans
At some point the Package: secondary header field may become mandatory
- at the moment omitting it just produces a warning message.
Obsolete X-Debian-PR: quiet feature
It used to be possible to prevent the bug tracking system from
forwarding anywhere messages it received at debian-bugs, by putting an
X-Debian-PR: quiet line in the actual mail header.
This header line is now ignored. Instead, send your message to quiet
or nnn-quiet (or maintonly or nnn-maintonly).
_________________________________________________________________
Ian Jackson / owner@bugs.debian.org. 20th July 1996.