How to report bugs (was glibc thing)
"Eray Ozkural (exa)" <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr> writes:
> The preprocessor macro seems to be undefined. There are also other
> subtleties while using pthread lib, such as the __USE_UNIX_98 stuff,
> which I really don't know (I only use c++, and UNIX_98 sections don't
> seem to come along. Why is that?)
> ...
> Now, I think what I say is fairly obvious but the package maintainer
> dismisses this bug like this with a changelog entry:
No, while there were maybe more polite ways to ask for more information I'm
sure it gets tiresome doing so repeatedly on a large package like glibc.
The fact is this is *not* a useful bug report.
To be useful a bug report must answer the following questions:
1) What did you do to cause the bug
2) What did you observe
3) What did you expect to observe
4) Why do you think what you observed was a bug
In this case saying it "seems to be undefined" leaves a million and one
questions unanswered. Do you mean you couldn't find it in the include files?
Or did your program fail because it wasn't defined? Which include files were
you including? What other defines did already have? ...
A useful bug report would have been of the form:
I compiled the following C or C++ file with the following options:
...
I got the following error indicating this macro wasn't defined:
...
I expected the macro to be defined and this file should compile because:
...
Just writing in your conclusions is useless 90% of the time. Your conclusions
may be right but the maintainer doesn't have ESP and can't necessarily deduce
where they came from and what the bug is.
--
greg
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