Product Specific Guidelines

Here is a list of guidelines for triaging bugs that are specific to individual products in bugzilla. We try to keep just a few (no more than three or four) short guidelines for each product, possibly including a link to another page if a certain product has many additional guidelines to provide. There are no specific guidelines for a product at this time if the product is not listed here.

If you are a maintainer, please help us keep this list updated.

• Important: Do not triage bug reports from the following products (i.e. skip them):

  • vte
  • pango

• Bug-Buddy: Program that assists users in submitting bug reports

  • It is common for bugs corresponding to other modules to be filed under bug-buddy, because some amateur users get confused easily.
  • All real bugs against bug-buddy should be filed under the "general" component. The "test" component is only for internal testing purposes.

• Control-Center: Area of Gnome that deals with setting preferences

  • Any problems related to versions before 2.4.x can be closed as WONTFIX
  • Knowing what platform and what version of X is extremely important.
  • If the problem is keyboard related and reported for versions newer than 2.5.x please request information about the users's keyboard configuartion, specifically the output of:
    • xprop -root | grep XKB
    • gconftool-2 -R /desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/xkb
    • xdpyinfo | head
  • Bugs in the documentation should be moved to product 'gnome-user-docs', component 'user-guide'.

• dbus : The dbus message bus system

  • Bugs do not belong in Gnome's bugzilla but here: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus

• Ekiga: VoIP software using H.323 and SIP, also supporting video

  • If possible get a backtrace from the user with all thread backtraces (i.e. using 'bt thread apply all' instead of 'bt' in GDB).
  • It is important to find out how the user installed it, whether from a distribution or from source code.
  • If they were using a camera the model number is helpful, as is the drive they are using to get access to the camera.

• Empathy: text, voice, and video chat application, built atop Telepathy

  • Debugging tips -- Recent Empathy versions (2.27 onwards) include a Debugging Console that allows the user to retrieve debugging logs from supported Telepathy Connection Managers.

  • Tips for troubleshooting specific protocols

• Epiphany: Gecko (stable 2.22, 2.24, 2.26) / Webkit (trunk) based browser for the Gnome platform

  • If the component is set to BugBuddyBugs and it is a good bug, please move it to the correct component (that component exists to separate the triaged wheat from the untriaged chaff).

  • Check if the bug is related to mozilla. If there is a stack trace it's pretty easy to see if it's crashing in a mozilla function. Usually bugs related to the web page (rendering for example) are mozilla bugs too. Close the bug with the mozilla canned reply.

  • If you can't tell, ask the reporter to try to reproduce it with mozilla itself. Then:
    • If it's reproducable with mozilla then you should close it with resolution NOTGNOME.

    • If it's mozilla related but cannot be reproduced with mozilla itself, then it's probably a mozilla embedding bug (this can usually be confirmed with TestGtkEmbed). In that case we need to make sure it's already in bugzilla.mozilla.org. If it's not, then we report it and put a reference to the mozilla bug in our bug report.

  • If the Adobe Flash plugin occurs in the stack trace, just close the bug with the crash-flash-plugin canned reply.

  • If the Sun Java, VLC, or any other non-gnome plugin occurs in the stack trace, close it with the notgnome canned reply.

  • However, if the swfdec plugin occurs in the stack trace, move the bug to the swfdec-gnome product.

• Evince:

  • If the component is set to BugBuddyBugs and it is a good bug, please move it to the correct component (that component exists to separate the triaged wheat from the untriaged chaff).

  • If bug is problem with pdf, it's probably a poppler problem. Read Poppler bugs

  • Otherwise, feel free to check if bug is reproduced and confirm it
  • Do not mark crashes from 0.6.x as needinfo. Mark them as OBSOLETE/DUPLICATE.

• Evolution:

  • If the component is set to BugBuddyBugs and it is a good bug, please move it to the correct component (that component exists to separate the triaged wheat from the untriaged chaff).

  • Any new incoming bug reports with versions before 2.8.x can be closed as OBSOLETE

  • Additional debug hints can be found at http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/bugs.shtml

• Gcalctool: Double math precision library

  • If this is a crasher, and the stack trace shows that it crashed in remove_tsep() or is having problems with constants like "0.621", this is probably a duplicate of bug #128603. Ask them what version of gcalctool they are running (Help->About from the menubar gives you this), and if it's something before v4.3.32, get them to see if they can reproduce the problem with the latest version from this page. This happens a lot since a broken version of gcalctool went into a RedHat distribution.

  • If a "bug" complains about the wording of a particular gcalctool label or option, then add " breda.mccolgan@sun.com " to the cc: of the bug report, and ask her to give TheWord(TM) on whether this needs to be adjusted. Typically this will be closed as NOTABUG. The user just wants to express their opinion. We get an inordinate number of these "bugs".

  • If a bug reports a problem with the new "thousands separator" feature, ask them what version of gcalctool they are using. If it's earlier than v4.3.40, get them to try their problem with latest version from this page. If this doesn't fix them problem, please make sure that they tell you which locale they are running in and provide a set of instructions that replicate the problem.

• gDesklets: Desktop applets

  • Any problems related to versions before 0.30 can be closed as OBSOLETE.

  • If the crash is related to a particular display, tell the user to search the forum http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=23. The crash is very unlikely to be related to gdesklets' core and might me closed as NOTGNOME.

  • If the crash is related to gdesklets-shell, please ask the user to start gdesklets-shell ("gdesklets shell") in a shell (terminal) and then provide error messages.
  • Else, stacktrace and debug info should be found in ~/.gdesklets/gdesklets.log where DISPLAY is your X display (e.g. ~/gdesklets/gdesklets:0.0.log). Please ask the user to attach his logfile after the crash.

• Gedit: Text editor

  • If the stack trace contains a lot of python related functions, it could be:

    • a crash due to Python initialization (see bug #328455)

    • a crash due to a buggy python plugin (see for example bug #369934)

    In both cases ask for the list of active plugins (use the command gconftool-2 -g /apps/gedit-2/plugins/active-plugins). Ask also to run gedit from gnome-terminal and attach the warning messages it prints.

• Ggv: Gnome GhostView program to display PostScript documents

  • Ggv is no longer maintained and has been substituted by Evince. Any Ggv bugs can be closed as WONTFIX.

• GIMP: GNU Image Manipulation Program

  • The GIMP Developer FAQ contains a section about how to handle bugs in Bugzilla. Pay attention to the parts about accidental duplicates (marked as INVALID) and how to properly mark a bug as RESOLVED FIXED with references to ChangeLog entries.

• Gnome-Desktop: Contains the library libgnome and libgnomeui

  • Unless the bug is related to libgnome-desktop (i.e it has something to do with code for handling launchers/.desktop files), gnome-about, the icons in the pixmaps dir or .directory files, it doesn't belong in this module.
  • If the bug is related to a failure to properly handle .desktop file, request a copy of that file.

• gnome-doc-utils: Documentation utilities

  • See Yelp

• Gnome-Games: Package that contains all the games for Gnome

  • Getting stack traces for most GNOME games is hard. When asking for a stack trace ask that they either do it as root or remove the setgid bit from the game in question.
  • Make sure that the version of gnome-games is reported. This makes sorting old (and fixed) bugs from new bugs easier. Almost every bug from version 2.2 is a duplicate now-days.

  • If the component is set to BugBuddyBugs and it is a good bug, please move it to the correct component (that component exists to separate the triaged wheat from the untriaged chaff).

• Gnome-Media: Various tools such as cd players and audio mixers

  • Crashers in gnome-sound-recorder in versions older than 2.6 (or even 2.8) are almost always dups of existing ones. Those can be closed or dup'ed. Most likely, only 2.10 bugs are worth looking at.

  • Crashers in all GStreamer-components in versions <= 2.8 on initialization ("it doesn't start") with a bazktrace going back to gst_pipeline_init() -> abort() is a missing registry. Tell the user to run gst-register-0.8 as root and remove ~/.gstreamer-0.8/registry.xml. Most (all?) 2.10 components presents a dialog with this same information if it's missing/broken.

• Gnome-Panel: Component for applications related to application, taskbar, and applet layout

  • To debug with gdb do
    1. $ gdb /usr/bin/gnome-panel
    2. $ (gdb) set args --replace
    3. $ (gdb) run

• Gnome-Pilot: GNOME applet for management of your Palm PDA

  • It can be useful to figure out if the problem is with gnome-pilot or the lower, pilot-link, layer. To isolate (assuming you have pilot-xfer installed) try the following:

    1. Kill gpilotd (you may need to remove the pilot applet from the panel, and then do killall gpilotd from a terminal window).

    2. Now try running pilot-xfer: pilot-xfer -p /dev/pilot -l (or '-p /dev/ttyUSB0', or '-p /dev/ttyUSB1', or '-p net:', etc)

    3. If that doesn't work, then you have most likely got a problem with your kernel/udev/usb/cables, etc, not gnome-pilot.
  • It can also be useful to see the output from the gpilotd daemon. To do this:

    1. Kill gpilotd (you may need to remove the pilot applet from the panel, and then do killall gpilotd from a terminal window).

    2. Restart gpilotd (the default location is /usr/libexec/gpilotd, but this may be distribution-dependent).

• Gnome-Terminal: Shell Component frontend for vte terminal emulator widget

  • Determine whether the bug pertains to the gnome terminal user interface itself, or the terminal emulation. In the latter case it should be moved to the vte product and not be triaged further in accordance with the special instructions below for vte.

• Gnome-Themes: Themes component of gnome 2.4 default themes

  • If the bug involves the Theme Preferences dialog crashing or otherwise misbehaving, the bug should be re-assigned to gnome-control-center/theme-manager.

• Gnome-Utils: Utilities such as gnome-search-tool, gnome-dictionary, and gfloppy

  • The gnome-dictionary code base has been changed between 2.12 and 2.13/2.14: crashers referring to versions before the change can be closed with OBSOLETE.

  • It seems that GnoTime bugs are filed in the gnome-utils component; these bugs should be marked as NOTGNOME and the reporter should be directed to the GnoTime bugtracker on sourceforge.net.

• Gok: On-screen keyboard software

  • Please report all bugs. When possible, attempting to re-create bugs with at-poke (a gnome project) can help significantly with Gok triage. This is only relevant for bugs related to the use of the at-spi (i.e. bugs related to Gok's interoperation with other applications).

• Gpdf: Gnome pdf viewer

  • Gpdf is no longer maintained and has been substituted by Evince. Any Gpdf bugs can be closed as WONTFIX.

• Gstreamer: Framework for streaming media such as audio and video

  • If the crash is related to a specific media file, please ask the user to provide a link to that media file. (Or other means of accessing it)
  • Many bugs filed against other products (e.g. gst-player, rhythmbox, totem, etc.) that use gstreamer should be filed against gstreamer instead. If the backtrace of such a bug shows that the application is crashing in a function that starts with 'gst_', it is probably a gstreamer bug.
  • It is often useful to have full debugging information compressed and attached to the bug. One can get debugging information by adding '--gst-debug-level=5' to the application command line and redirecting output to a file.

  • Try running gst-launch-0.10 playbin uri="file:///path/to/file" and save the output.

• Gtk+: The GTK+ widget toolkit -- taken from gtk.org/bugs.html:

  • If you can reproduce it with the testgtk program that is built in the gtk/ subdirectory, that will be most convenient. Otherwise, ask to include a short test program that exhibits the behavior. As a last resort, ask to provide a pointer to a larger piece of software that can be downloaded
  • Bugs that can be reproduced within the GIMP are almost as good as bugs that can be reproduced in testgtk
  • If the bug was a crash, the exact text that was printed out when the crash occurred
  • If there is a stack trace, and the error is an X error, it will be more useful if the stacktrace is produced running the test program with the --sync command line option

• Gucharmap: The GNOME Character Map

  • As requested by the maintainer, please do not triage the bug reports of this module.

• Libgnomeprint: Gnome Printing Library

  • For any problems relating to startup or lockup check to see if CUPS is installed or in use and the version of CUPS being used.
  • Be sure to find out what locale the problem is appearing in.
  • If the problem is appearing when printing from an application please get
    1. The name and the version of the application in question
    2. The content being printed and instructions on how the reporter is initiating the print
  • If the output is somehow invalid please get a copy of the invalid result too, in case we can not reproduce it.

• Libwnck: Window Navigator Construction Kit

  • Common bugs to dup against are listed in libwnck/rationales.txt in CVS; note specifically that the tracker bugs have organized many (but definitely not all) of the bugs into categories that should make it easier to find duplicates.

• Metacity: Default Window Manager for the Gnome Platform

  • Common bugs to dup against are listed in metacity/rationales.txt in CVS; note specifically that the tracker bugs have organized many (but definitely not all) of the bugs into categories that should make it easier to find duplicates.

  • A verbose log is useful for all crashes, but in particular for any "weird behavior in a particular situation" sort of bugs that we cannot duplicate easily. Such a log can be obtained by:
    1. Reduce your desktop to as few windows as possible to reproduce the bug
    2. Run METACITY_VERBOSE=1 METACITY_USE_LOGFILE=1 metacity --replace
    3. On stdout metacity will print the name of the logfile
    4. Reproduce the bug as quickly as possible
    5. Kill the metacity you started above to stop the logfile from growing any longer
    6. Compress the logfile and attach it to your bug report

• Nautilus: File Manager for the Gnome Platform

  • Bugs in the documentation should be moved to product 'gnome-user-docs', component 'user-guide'.

• Nautilus-Cd-Burner: Cd writing module for Nautilus

  • You can get additional debug information by doing this:
    • change /apps/nautilus-cd-burner/debug with gconf-editor

    • gnome-session-remove nautilus

    • nautilus

  • and running list_cddrives (which you find in the compiled source (or /usr/lib/nautilus-cd-burner/list_cddrives in the Ubuntu package nautilus-cd-burner))

• Pango: An internationalized text handling library

  • As requested by the maintainer, please do not triage the bug reports of this module.

• Totem: A movie player

  • See Totem's Home Page

• Vte: Terminal Emulation Component

  • As requested by the maintainer, please do not triage the bug reports of this module.

• Yelp: Help and Documentation Browser for the Gnome Platform

  • See Yelp

• Zenity: Component to allow dialog boxes from outside sources, such as scripts