14. The Debian Bug Report System

14.1 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.debian.org/Bugs/.

A mail server provides access to the bug tracking system database via e-mail. In order to get the instructions send an e-mail to request@bugs.debian.org with "help" in the body.

14.2 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 doc/bug-reporting.txt.
• From the WWW. A copy of the instructions is shown at http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting.html
• On any Debian system with the doc-debian package installed. The instructions are in the file /usr/doc/debian/bug-reporting.txt.

Use these mail addresses 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, entered into the bug log and forwarded to the debian-bugs-dist mailing list.
• maintonly@bugs.debian.org: to send bug reports to the maintainer only. It will not be forwarded to the debian-bugs-dist mailing list.
• quiet@bugs.debian.org: to submit bug reports to the bug log only, without having them sent either to debian-bugs-dist or to the maintainer.

Please, note that there is a Debian package checker called Lintian, which is designed to mechanically check Debian packages for policy violations and common packaging errors. Thus, if you detect a bug in a package which is likely to appear in other packages too, it might be better to get in contact with the Lintian maintainers so that a new check is written for Lintian instead of reporting the bug directly. This will prevent the bug to appear in future versions of the package again, or in any other package of the distribution.