GNU Astronomy Utilities: Report a bug

GNU Astronomy Utilities manual

1.7 Report a bug

According to Wikipedia “a software bug is an error, flaw, failure, or fault in a computer program or system that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways”. So when you see that a program is crashing, not reading your input correctly, giving the wrong results, or not writing your output correctly, you have found a bug. In such cases, it is best if you report the bug to the developers. If it is an immediate issue, the developers will work hard to correct it as soon as possible.

Prior to actually filing a bug, it is best to search previous reports. The issue might have already been found and even solved. Recently corrected bugs are probably not yet publicly released because they are scheduled for the next Gnuastro stable release. If the bug is solved but not yet released and it is an urgent issue for you, you can get the version controlled source and compile that, see Version controlled source. There are generally two ways to inform us of bugs:

Send a mail to bug-gnuastro@gnu.org. Any mail you send to this address will be distributed through the bug-gnuastro mailing list. This is the simplest and preferred way to send bug reports. The archives of this mailing list can be found at http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnuastro/.
“Submit a new item” to the “Communication tools” section of the Gnuastro project webpage ¹². All the bug reports that are sent for Gnuastro (including the mailing list) are ultimately stored and managed in the Gnuastro project Bugs tracker ¹³. Users can also initiate a bug report from the project webpage directly through the “Support”→“Submit new” links on the top of the page or the “Submit a new item” link under the “Tech Support Manager” section (with a red question mark beside it) of the main Gnuastro project page. You can browse or submit a new item to this list anonymously. See Gnuastro project webpage for more information about the central management hub of Gnuastro.

Once the items have been gathered from the mailing list or webpage, the developers will add it to either the “Bug Tracker” or “Task Manager” trackers of the Gnuastro project webpage. These two trackers can only be edited by the Gnuastro project members, but they can be browsed by anyone. So prior to filing a bug report please browse and search these two trackers to see if the issue has already been solved or is being solved.

Individual and independent bug reports: If you have found multiple bugs, please send them as separate (and independent) mails as much as possible. This will significantly help us in managing and resolving them sooner.

Reproducible bug reports: If we cannot reproduce your bug, then it is very hard to resolve it. So please send us a Minimal working example¹⁴ along with the description. For example in running a program, please send us the full command line text and the output with the -P option, see Final parameter values, reproduce previous results. If it is caused only for a certain input, also send us that input file. In case the input FITS is large, please use ImageCrop to only crop the problematic section and make it as small as possible so it can easily be uploaded and downloaded and not waste the archive’s storage, see ImageCrop.

GNU Astronomy Utilities manual

1.7 Report a bug

Footnotes

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