Reporting Trouble

We've tried to make the programs in this release of the Cygnus Support Developer's Kit as trouble-free as possible. If you do encounter problems, however, we'd like to diagnose and fix the problem as quickly as possible. You can help us do that by using the script send-pr to send us your problem reports (PRs). send-pr comes with this release, and is easily configured to send reports back to Cygnus.

send-pr invokes an editor on a problem report form (after trying to fill in some fields with reasonable default values). After you exit the editor, send-pr sends the filled out form to the Problem Report Management System (PRMS) at Cygnus Support. You can use the environment variable EDITOR to specify which editor to use (the default is vi). Emacs users will find PRMS especially easy to use.

For more information on send-pr, see section `Overview' in Reporting Problems.

Filling out a problem report

Problem reports are structured so that a database program can manage them. When you fill out the form, please remember the following guidelines:

• Each PR needs a valid customer-id and category.
• Describe only one problem per PR.
• For follow-up mail, use the same subject line as the one in the automatic acknowledgment. It shows the category, the PR number and the original synopsis line. This causes your mail to automatically be filed with the original bug report. Your followup comments will be sent to all the people who are working on the bug.
• Please try to make the subject or synopsis line as informative as possible. For misbehaving software, you might use a sentence of the form `Encrypted rlogin hangs if you send interrupt' or `g++: calling wrong overloaded function.'
• You don't need to delete the comment lines while editing the PR form; this is done by send-pr. Put your information before or after the comments.

Consult the section `Examples and guidelines for effective PRs' in Reporting Problems, for more discussion on this topic.