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.