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Bugzilla Information

Written and maintained by DustinNavea

Administrator: TonyLambregts

Intro to Bugzilla

What is it and, OMG is it coming to a town near you?!

Relax people, don't worry, Bugzilla is not the bug form of Godzilla.. Although in some projects, it starts to look that way..

Bugzilla is, simply put, a way to categorize and manage the problems/snags encountered during the development lifecycle of a project. It does not necessarily have to be a programming project, but that seems to be the predominant use. Another way of looking at it would be that it is a BIG database of all of the problems/snags encountered by any user that wants to contribute to that project and decides to report it.

Of course since we are talking about the Wine project here, it is a way to categorize and manage the bugs encountered, or it could be a BIG database of all of those bugs that have been reported.

If you don't know what a bug is, in the programming sense, please don't ask. You will just be ridiculed Oh, and if you don't know what programming is, you should find the thick black cord coming out of the back of your computer, and yank that out. Then put the whole computer in a cardboard box, and take it back to the store where you purchased it. :-D Im JUST KIDDING.. JEEZ..

Why Bugzilla?

For that, you really should read the section above this one (Intro To Bugzilla). But if you insist, because Bugzilla makes developers' lives easier. When they are trying to fix multiple bugs at once, they can make comments about what they have done so far and what all has left to be done.. Or they can just say hey, this isn't going to be fixed for some time, because there is too much going on for me to be able to tackle it.

Brief intro to Wine

What is Wine?

• First off, Wine is an application portability layer. What that means is that Wine can help you to run your windows programs (without modification) on Linux.

Of course, a lot of people say that Wine is an emulator.. Here is why it is not:

• 1) The definition of emulator from dictionary.com is:
  • a) To imitate the function of (another system), as by modifications to hardware or software that allow the
    • imitating system to accept the same data, execute the same programs, and achieve the same results as the imitated system.
  2) The definition of emulation from dictionary.com is:
  • a) The process or technique of emulating.
  3) Emulation is usually considered to make things run slower, because the routines in the original code have to
  • be run as is, and then that code has to be converted to something that the system you are running on can understand.
• While Wine DOES emulate windows, and (at least by definition) is an emulator, Wine really is not an emulator
  • because of the fact that it has been proven to run programs as fast as they do on Windows, if not faster than they do on windows.

With that in mind, on to the next section..

Guidelines for reporting bugs

Just some courtesies that you should try to follow.

• Don't change the severity or priority, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. We will take care of that.
• Don't paste the output of the console to a comment, attach it.
• Don't attach any compressed files, unless it is already a large binary (executable), or unless it is already
  • compressed when you get it (like a lot of programs are).

• When you receive a mail from bugs@winehq.org, please don't reply to the mail, please post your reply in the

  • comments of the bug.

Misunderstandings when reporting bugs

A great many people have reported bugs to Wine, only to be told that it is already fixed, wont be fixed, or that their bug is already known and is being worked on. Of course they have no idea how to find out this information, or didn't care to look, and so get frustrated when told that.

The whole aim of this document is to remedy that..

Here are some ways you can find out:

• FIRST, make sure you are using the most recent Wine release, or most up-to-the-second CVS checkout.
  • The most recent Wine release can always be obtained at:

    http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/system/emulators/wine/?M=D This will be the universal Wine release, meaning that it will work under ANY recent linux distro, because it isn't modified by the distro maintainers.

• Search the bugzilla database, and if nothing comes up, see below.
  • If you need help searching the Bugzilla DB, click the "Give me some help" link. If that doesn't help, see below.

• Look/search through the mailing list archives. Go to http://www.winehq.org/site/forums and browse though

  • archive 1 for wine-devel, or wine-patches, or use the search in archive 2 for wine-devel or wine-patches
• Subscribe to the wine-devel list, and ask.
  • Of course, that means ASK, don't subscribe and try to report bugs that way, as they will be promptly ignored, unless you have the information that is needed to have someone fix it.

The other and more common misunderstanding is that you can just put the name of the program having the problem and a description of the problem, and it will be fixed. If course, since I personally review every bugzilla email, if I can tell what caused the problem by that description, I will try to post some information about it. But, alas, most of the time I cannot, and therefore I probe for more information. Here is what should be included in EVERY bug report, in no particular order.

1. The name of the program having the problem
2. The version number, if it only occurs with 1 version.
   • If you are unsure, put the version anyways and we can remove it later, if need be.
3. The Wine release, or the time/date of the cvs checkout.
4. Brief description of the problem (can be used as the summary if you like)
5. Detailed description of the problem
6. Anything that was output to the console window, if applicable.
7. Any message boxes that popped up, and what they said.
8. If it is a problem with the way something looks, attach a screenshot
9. If you think you know what component is having the problem, attach the WINEDEBUG= log
   • If its small, attach the whole thing
   • If it is large (10mb or more) attach the last 2000 lines of it
   • And when posting the log, please put what debug commands you used.

Quality Assurance or How can I help?

BugzillaTriage

DanKegel has written a page on how to help with Wine Quality Assurance; one section is devoted to How To Help with Bugzilla Triage

Todo

• Think up some more courtesies
• Think up some more information to be included in the initial bug report
• Get this Wiki posted to the Wine HQ main page, and the bugzilla main page (if not the sidebars of both)

• Move Dan's Bugzilla QA page to WineHQ (but ask him first)