How to report a Bug in PARI/GP

Important things to note before sending

Please do not report several unrelated bugs in a single Bug report.

Please check active bugs to see whether your Bug report has already been filed by someone else before submitting it. You may submit comments to an existing Bug report #<number> by sending e-mail to <number>@pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr

Never CC your Bug report directly to additional recipients, use a different method.

Sending the bug report via e-mail

Send mail to submit@pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr, as described below.

Please include a clear, descriptive Subject line in your main mail header. The subject you give will be used as the initial Bug title in the tracking system, so please try to make it informative! You need to put a pseudo-header at the start of the body of the message. That means that the first two lines of the message body should say:

    Package: <xxx>
    Version: <yyy>

Replace <xxx> with the name of the package which has the Bug (e.g. pari, pari-stable, or gp2c). Replace <yyy> with the version of the software.

All pseudo-header fields should start at the very start of their lines, so make sure to remove leading whitespace.

Please include in your report:

The exact and complete text of any error messages printed or logged. This is very important!
Exactly what you typed or did to demonstrate the problem.
A description of the incorrect behaviour: exactly what behaviour you were expecting, and what you observed. A transcript of an example session is a good way of showing this.
A suggested fix, or even a patch, if you have one.
Details of the configuration of the program with the problem.

Include any detail that seems relevant - you are in little danger of making your report too long by including too much information. If they are small please include in your report any files you were using to reproduce the problem (uuencoding them if they may contain odd characters etc.).

Example

A Bug report, with mail header, looks something like this:

    To: submit@pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr
    From: diligent@testing.linux.org
    Subject: Pari says `Goodbye'

    Package: pari
    Version: 2.2.8

    When exiting, gp mutters a bland, contrived, and frankly quite unpersonal
    Goodbye. I suggest the more appropriate
    
        So Long and Thanks for all the fish

    Here is a transcript:

    
    Reading GPRC: /home/diligent/.gprc ...Done.

         GP/PARI CALCULATOR Version 2.2.8 (development CHANGES-1.969)
                i686 running linux (ix86 kernel) 32-bit version
      compiled: Jun 24 2004, gcc version 2.95.4 20011002 (Debian prerelease)
                (readline v4.2 enabled, extended help available)
    [...]
    (10:07) gp> quit
    Goodbye!

    I suggest that the output string, in src/gp/gp.c:gp_quit(), be corrected.

    I am using Debian GNU/Linux 2.2, kernel 2.2.17-pre-patch-13
    and libc6 2.1.3-10.

Sending copies of Bug reports to other addresses

Sometimes it is necessary to send a copy of a Bug report to somewhere else besides the mailing list and the package maintainer, which is where they are normally sent.

You could do this by CC'ing your Bug report to the other address(es), but then the other copies would not have the Bug report number put in the Reply-To field and the Subject line. When the recipients reply they will preserve the submit@pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr entry in the header and have their message filed as a new Bug report. This leads to duplicated reports.

The right way to do this is to use the X-Debbugs-CC header. Add a line like this to your message's mail header (not to the pseudo header with the Package field):

    X-Debbugs-CC: other-list@cosmic.edu

This will cause the Bug tracking system to send a copy of your report to the address(es) in the X-Debbugs-CC line.

This feature can often be combined usefully with mailing quiet - see below.

Severity levels

If your report is of a particularly serious Bug, or is merely a feature request, you may set the severity level of the Bug as you report it. This is not required, however, and the developers will assign an appropriate severity level to your report if you do not.

To assign a severity level, put a line like this one in the pseudo-header:

    Severity: <severity>

Replace <severity> with one of the available severity levels, as described in the developers' documentation.

Assigning tags

You can set tags on a Bug as you are reporting it. For example, if you are including a patch with your Bug report, you may wish to set the patch tag. This is not required, and the developers will set tags on your report as and when it is appropriate.

To set tags, put a line like this one in the pseudo-header:

    Tags: <tags>

Replace <tags> with one or more of the available tags, as described in the developers' documentation. Separate multiple tags with commas, spaces, or both.

Not forwarding to the mailing list - minor Bug reports

If a Bug report is minor (for example, a documentation typo or other trivial build problem), or you're submitting many reports at once, send them to maintonly@pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr or quiet@pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr. maintonly will send the report on to the package maintainer (provided you supply a correct Package line in the pseudo-header), and quiet will not forward it anywhere at all but only file it as a Bug (useful if, for example, you are submitting many similar bugs and want to post only a summary).

If you do this the Bug system will set the Reply-To of any forwarded message so that replies will by default be processed in the same way as the original report.

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