/ 
Perlbug-2.91
/ AdminFAQ

NAME

AdminFAQ - The Perl Bug Administrator FAQ

DESCRIPTION

Frequently Asked Questions related to Perl Bug Administration.

$Revision: 1.5 $ $Date: 2001/12/06 04:53:46 $

This FAQ

This FAQ is intended for use by the perlbug administrators. The latest version can be found at http://bugs.perl.org/admin/perlbug.cgi?req=adminfaq. If you have any comments or patches to this document, please send them to the author at the address below.

Who are the perl bugmongers?

The perl bugmongers are the Perl Bug Adminstrators. Some of these people are active Perl Porters, others are just interested in learning or helping out.

What do the bugmongers do?

  • Clean up old bugs

  • Organize/categorize and assign new bugs

  • Discuss better ways for dealing with perl bugs

What is the lifecycle of a perl bug?

  1. A bug report is submitted with the perlbug program to one of the following addresses:

    perlbug@perl.org
perlbug@perl.com
macperlbug@perl.org
perl-win32-porters@perl.org
module-bug@perl.org

    Mail to these addresses is forwarded to a program called perlbugtron.

  2. A tracking number is automatically generated by perlbugtron, and the message is forwarded to perl5-porters@perl.org (or macperl-porters@macperl.org for Mac bug reports, or perl-win32-porters@activestate.com for Windows bug reports.)

  3. A discusion ensues on p5p regarding a solution for the bug. During this time, a perlbug admin should categorize the bug, and possibly assign it.

  4. One or more solutions are proposed, and one is approved by consensus and/or the pumpking.

  5. A perlbug admin marks the bug as closed.

How do I close a bug?

This process varies depending on the age of the bug. There are many bugs in the bug database dating back several years. Many of these bugs have already been solved in recent version of perl. These are old bugs.

Everything else is a new bug.

(Another way to make this distinction is this: Anything that requires the attention of p5p is a new bug.)

How does a non-administrator close a bug?

They can send an email to admins@bugs.perl.org with your suggestions, or to propose_close_<bugid>@bugs.perl.org where <bugid> is the the bug ID of the bug you want to close.

How do I close an old bug?

  1. Perform the necessary tests to prove it has been solved.

  2. Make an entry in the bug database noting the reason you are closing it. This can be as simple as "fixed in perl 5.6.0 (tested on Jul 17 2000)".

    The easiest way to make this entry is to send a message to close_<bugid>@bugs.perl.org, where the content of the message is the log entry.

How do I close a new bug?

If there has been a thread on p5p culminating in a patch (or some other final looking statement), mark the bug as closed. You may wish to add a comment along the lines of "resolved in <msgid>"

When do I delete a bug?

Bugs should rarely be deleted. There may be times when a bug should not be in the database, for example, spam that may have gotten through, or an exact duplicate of another bug report. (And in the duplicate case, it's probably better to link the bug to the other copy, to make sure the threads keep properly, if there has been discussion under both ids.)

I don't want to bother p5p with a bug related email. How do I get it into the database?

Send (or CC) the email to track@bugs.perl.org. Your message must have a subject line that contains [ID <bugid>], where <bugid> is the bug ID number.

What versions of perl should I check for bugs to have been fixed in?

Generally, you should check 5.00503, 5.6.1, perl-current, and perl-5.6.x-current. Theoretically, once it works in an earlier version, it will work in all future versions, but it can't hurt to perform the regression test by hand.

Web Interface: Those Checkboxes

Discussed in bugmongers Message-id: <397466D6.6F05E8B8@m.dasa.de>

The perlbugtron user interface has a lot of checkboxes. When you modify an item, you need to check the box for that item. Otherwise, when you click update, nothing will happen and you will receive an error message.

The page you get back after altering bugs will only have the bugs checked on it. So if you have a list of 25 bugs, and you edit 3 of them, the page you receive will have only these 3 bugs in it. This is so it is easier to check that your changes were entered correctly.

Why is the note text displayed outside of the textarea?

The note is displayed outside of the text area so you can add a new note in the textarea. If there's more than one note, the form will contain links to all the notes instead of the actual note texts.

What is the abandoned status for?

The abandoned status means: "This bug probably cannot be fixed. We may come back to fix it after all the other bugs have been resolved."

Bugs are very rarely abandoned without good reason.

As of this writing, bugs in the pre-5.6 install process are being abandoned. The installation system changed a lot for 5.6, and many issues were resolved.

How do I get more help?

To get more help on the email interface, send a message with the subject -h to bugdb@perl.org. For more detailed help, use -H;

Or you can use http://bugs.perl.org/perlbug.cgi?req=mailhelp

The definitive location for more help on the web interface is

http://bugs.perl.org/admin/perlbug.cgi?req=webhelp for administrators and http://bugs.perl.org/perlbug.cgi?req=webhelp for normal users

AUTHOR

Robert Spier <rspier at cpan.org>

THANKS

Mark-Jason Dominus

Richard Foley