Bug Reporting

From RevaWiki

Jump to: navigation, search

Return to the main manual page

Reva is a cooperative project, which relies on feedback from its user community in order to improve. One of the most helpful ways a user can assist the project is by providing timely and accurate bug reports.

In order to file a bug report, you must be logged onto the Reva forum. From there, click on the link at the top of the page, which says "Report bugs". That link will take you to the Reva bug database, where you will be able to file a bug report.

It is important to realize that "bugs" are not the only thing you can or should report. We are also interested in capturing requests for features and documentation issues.

[edit]

How to report a bug

When you go to the main bug database screen, there will be a menu of choices along the top of the screen. If you click on "Report Issue", you will be taken to a second screen where you can select the "Project" the bug refers to. Please do take care to select the correct project, as it is difficult to change this after the bug report is created and if it is incorrect, we may not notice the bug for a while. You have the option, on that screen, of selecting "Make default", which makes that project the default for you, for reporting bugs. This is probably a good choice. Select "Reva" as the project, and click "Select Project".

Now you will be in a screen that says "Enter Report Details". Please take your time and select the most fitting reponse to each field you can fill in. The topmost field is "Category". There are a number of choices here, and the proper choice will make your bug report more likely to be handled properly. The other fields are more or less self-explanatory. If you do not see all the fields you expect, it's because this is the "simple" screen. You can click on the "Advanced Report" link in the upper right, and then you will be taken to a form with many more options (for example, OS etc.) Most of the time, the simple form is sufficient.

[edit]

Reporting useful bugs

In short: be specific. More specifically:

  • Give a meaningful title to the bug
  • Choose a category that most closely matches
  • If you know it only happens on one OS, use the "advanced report" page and indicate the OS
  • Specify the version of Reva the bug was first noticed
  • Give detailed repro steps. If you can, give a short code example which demonstrates the problem. This is important, because if the steps you give are not detailed enough, we may be unable to reproduce the problem and therefore be unable to fix it. This will frustrate you and us.
  • Upload any files necessary (which are not already part of the stock Reva). If the necessary files contain proprietary information, please change that information so there is no chance of compromising it. The bug database is public, so please do be careful with this. Also, use "zip" (WinZip, or whatever) to compress your files if they are over 10K or so.
  • If you must upload confidential information, then please use "gnupg" and encrypt the file for "Ron Aaron" using his public key with the signature "8130 734C 69A3 6542 0853 CB42 3ECF 9259 AD29 415D"
[edit]

Formatting the bug report

You can use HTML to make your bug report easier to understand. For example, use the "pre" tag around code sequences (or "tt" for inline monospaced text. You can use these tags, remember to match those which need matching:

  • p paragraph
  • b bold
  • i italic
  • u underlined
  • br line break
  • hr horizontal line
  • pre code text (monospace, line break honored)
  • tt inline code (monospace)
  • ul unordered (bullet) list
  • ol ordered (numbered) list
  • li list item (for either ul or ol)

You cannot use "Wiki" markup, the bug database being used does not understand Wiki markup.

Retrieved from "http://ronware.org/reva/wiki/Bug_Reporting"
Personal tools