posting and filing bugs

I wanted to take two seconds to mention just a few things on how users can help out developers when filing bugs, or posting them on bugzilla or the forums. I’m sure many other people out there can add to the list of helpful things, but these are the ones that I see the most.

First of all, if you’re posting for help on something that didn’t emerge properly, at the very least post this information: the output of “emerge -pv package” and “emerge –info”.

Yes, I could grep the USE flags you’re using from emerge –info, but that doesn’t help with all the package.use foobery that crops up. Just post “this is my output for emerge -pv whatever” and where it dies, with a verbose error message.   Include about as much as you can, since many times there is too little information. Make it easier for people wanting to help you.

The output of “emerge –info” is really helpful too. It may not seem necessary, but it tells people which arch you’re on, and also your compilation flags as well. I always look at people’s CFLAGS first to see if they’ve got anything extremely funky in there, as that’s commonly a root cause of build errors.

If you’re filing a bug on bugzilla, please always put the full category, package name and version in the subject. This makes it easier for those looking at unassigned bugs to quickly know who it should be assigned to, and exactly where you are having problems. For the subject, just put “foo-bar/package-name-1.2.3 short bug summary” and that works perfectly.

Finally, thank you for actually filing bugs and posting problems. It’s much better than letting them get to you and leaving in a fit of rage complaining about how everything is broken. Besides, this way if there is a serious problem, and it’s not just user misconfiguration, it allows us to get it fixed properly so others can also enjoy a more stable system.

Thanks, guys. 🙂