Panduan Lengkap Untuk Pelaporan Bug Di Debian Linux

Now what this does is, it gives an idea to the maintainer of the state of your system. As you all know, almost all GNU/Linux distributions and the packages therein are based on a complex set of relationships with other packages. The maintainer needs to know what version of the package you were using, which other packages were there, what version were they at, apart from knowing that the integrity of the package hasn’t been tampered with in any way.

Now you need to fill in the banks –

I usually remove/delete cut the following, if you are a new user you could just answer the questions below and your bug report would be ready.

Step 7. The final changes made to spend the report

And in its place, I put the details as being shared right here:

Some more info. now – These two tags signal/tell the maintainers few things –

 User: [email protected]

The first tag is signaling that the bug being raised is part of debian-qa efforts.

Usertags: obsolete-conffile adequate

The second tag is telling the tool we have used and one of the common issues under which it has come -in this case obsolete-conffile.

There are few common and uncommon use-cases that adequate looks into. As shared before, will need another blog post to share about it in detail.

The other thing I’m telling/sharing the maintainer is s/he should be looking into debhelper (a toolkit for debian/rules) and to look for specific bits therein.

Tip – Paul Wise, better known as pabs in Debian community. He is a prolific contributor to Debian. As you can see from his wiki page and the secondary apps. He always has a never-ending list of applications, packages that would be interesting to package alongwith things that could be/need to be improved. I dunno if he has done any mentoring or not, do see signs of a good and goofy mentor in him. I sometimes ask, sometimes steal his ideas to help in Debian QA :)

Now, that the bug-report is complete, I have to send it via gmail.com . If you have enabled MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) and don’t have a gmail.com you can just send and it will be done. If on the other hand, you haven’t enabled MTA (like me) and like to do things yourself, log on to your gmail account, hit compose and then –

Step 8. The final step

To - [email protected]
 Subject - piuparts: adequate reports obsolete conffile for piuparts

Body of your mail should start with Package

something like this –

You might have noticed some labels, they are just to help me be somewhat organized as after you have reported some bugs it can become chaotic to know what’s going on. Gmail’s labels and filters make things somewhat sanish with the amount of mail I receive.

At that point, make sure to recheck the mail once more before clicking the send mail button. I usually click on save draft, review it once or twice before sending it over.

If you are satisfied click send and your bug-report will be sent to Debian BTS .

Step 9. Getting acknowledgment from Debian BTS server saying the bug has reached them.

Usually, within minutes I get a short acknowledgment mail from the Debian BTS, like in the gist being shared

Look at the time-stamp given, just 3 minutes apart from when the mail was sent. I sent the bug mail on 05:03 and got the automated reply saying everything went fine on 05:06 itself.

What I look for into the acknowledgment mail is the bug number as that is how I come to know how things are going with the bug. #854317

Post bug-reporting cycle.

Coincidentally, as can be seen, the package maintainer somehow was around the time when I filed the bug. I do know the importance of piuparts in the debian ecosystem but I didn’t think Andreas will act so quickly, so now probably the next point release or even bug-fix release will have the fix. As can be seen though, Andreas seems to be a busy bee seeing the number of packages he’s maintaining/co-maintaining, besides uploading Non-Maintainer Uploads (NMU) and QA uploads.

I hope I have given enough insight so you know what to do as and when things go wrong.

Tip – Nowadays, I usually follow couple of rules before filing a bug. First check the bts for existing list of bugs, for e.g. piuparts bugs page (as also shared by Simon Tatham above). If the bug is not listed there, more often than not, it the package has not too many dependencies, and I know there aren’t any configuration files that I might have to recreate then I usually purge the package and install the package afresh. If adequate still finds a fault, I usually report it. I don’t do that though for obsolete conffiles as they usually happen when you are upgrading from version x.1 to x.2 or something like that.

Using such simple tips I save time and energy for myself as well as the maintainer of a package.

At first, it may take sometime, after a while, the whole thing may take 10-15 minutes or even less, depending on the package in which the bug is found, the bug itself, replication of the bug etc.

That’s about it to make a bug-report in Debian using Reportbug.

Hopefully, you have gotten some idea the steps to finding bugs and reporting them. Please post any queries you have in the comments below and I’ll try my best to answer/share whatever little I know.