13. The Debian Bug Report System

13.1 Are there logs of known bugs?

The Debian Linux distribution has a bug tracking system which files details of bugs reported by users and developers. Each bug is given a number, and is kept on file until it is marked as having been dealt with.

Copies of this information are available at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/iwj10/debian-bugs/ and http://www.debian.org/Bugs/, but the latter is not up-to-date at present.

The HTML files, in a form suitable for using as part of an HTTP server document tree, are in the WebPages subdirectory of the Debian FTP archive.

The bug reports are also available by anonymous FTP from any Debian mirror in the directory debian-bugs/html/ for hypertext form, and in the directory debian-bugs/text/ for plain text form.

13.2 How do I report a bug in Debian?

If you have found a bug in Debian, please read the instructions for reporting a bug in Debian. These instructions can be obtained in one of several ways:

• By anonymous ftp. Debian mirror sites contain the instructions in the file debian-bugs/Reporting.html.
• From the WWW. A copy of the instructions is shown at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/iwj10/debian-bugs/Reporting.html
• On any Debian system with the doc-debian package installed. The instructions are in the compressed (gzip'd) file /usr/doc/debian/bug-reporting.txt.gz.

(Note that at the time of this writing, the files included in the doc-debian package are not up to date with recent changes in the bug tracking system.)

Use these mailing lists for bugs:

• submit@bugs.debian.org: for general bug reports. Expect to get an automatic acknowledgement of your bug report. It will also be automatically given a bug tracking number and entered into the Bug log.
• maintonly@bugs.debian.org: to send bug reports to the maintainer only. (It would otherwise be copied to the debian-devel mailing list.) For example, if one were to identify a bug that was common to many programs, then rather than entering dozens of bug reports, one might prefer to send individual bugs to maintonly, then send a summary report to debian-devel.
• quiet@bugs.debian.org: to submit bug reports to the list only, without having them sent either to debian-devel or to the maintainer.