There are many types of problems, and not all of them should engender a problem report. Of course, nobody is perfect, and there will be times when what seems to be a bug in a program is, in fact, a misunderstanding of the syntax for a command or a typographical error in a configuration file (though that in itself may sometimes be indicative of poor documentation or poor error handling in the application). There are still many cases where submitting a problem report is clearly not the right course of action, and will only serve to frustrate both the submitter and the developers. Conversely, there are cases where it might be appropriate to submit a problem report about something else than a bug—an enhancement or a new feature, for instance.
So how does one determine what is a bug and what is not? As a simple rule of thumb, the problem is not a bug if it can be expressed as a question (usually of the form “How do I do X?” or “Where can I find Y?”). It is not always quite so black and white, but the question rule covers a large majority of cases. When looking for an answer, consider posing the question to the FreeBSD general questions mailing list.
Consider these factors when submitting PRs about ports or other software that is not part of FreeBSD itself:
Please do not submit problem reports that simply state that a newer version of an application is available. Ports maintainers are automatically notified by portscout when a new version of an application becomes available. Actual patches to update a port to the latest version are welcome.
For unmaintained ports (MAINTAINER
is ports@FreeBSD.org),
a PR without an included patch is unlikely to get picked up
by a committer. To become the maintainer of an
unmaintained port, submit a PR with the request (patch
preferred but not required).
In either case, following the process described in Porter's Handbook will yield the best results. (You might also wish to read Contributing to the FreeBSD Ports Collection.)
A bug that cannot be reproduced can rarely be fixed. If the bug only occurred once and you cannot reproduce it, and it does not seem to happen to anybody else, chances are none of the developers will be able to reproduce it or figure out what is wrong. That does not mean it did not happen, but it does mean that the chances of your problem report ever leading to a bug fix are very slim. To make matters worse, often these kinds of bugs are actually caused by failing hard drives or overheating processors — you should always try to rule out these causes, whenever possible, before submitting a PR.
Next, to decide to whom you should file your problem report, you need to understand that the software that makes up FreeBSD is composed of several different elements:
Code in the base system that is written and maintained
by FreeBSD contributors, such as the kernel, the C library, and
the device drivers (categorized as kern);
the binary utilities (bin); the manual
pages and documentation (docs); and the
web pages (www). All bugs in these areas
should be reported to the FreeBSD developers.
Code in the base system that is written and maintained by others, and imported into FreeBSD and adapted. Examples include clang(1), and sendmail(8). Most bugs in these areas should be reported to the FreeBSD developers; but in some cases they may need to be reported to the original authors instead if the problems are not FreeBSD-specific.
Individual applications that are not in the base system
but are instead part of the FreeBSD Ports Collection (category
ports). Most of these applications are
not written by FreeBSD developers; what FreeBSD provides is merely
a framework for installing the application. Therefore, only
report a problem to the FreeBSD developers when the problem is
believed to be FreeBSD-specific; otherwise, report it to the
authors of the software.
Then, ascertain whether the problem is timely. There are few things that will annoy a developer more than receiving a problem report about a bug she has already fixed.
If the problem is in the base system, first read the FAQ section on FreeBSD versions, if you are not already familiar with the topic. It is not possible for FreeBSD to fix problems in anything other than certain recent branches of the base system, so filing a bug report about an older version will probably only result in a developer advising you to upgrade to a supported version to see if the problem still recurs. The Security Officer team maintains the list of supported versions.
If the problem is in a port, consider filing a bug with the upstream. The FreeBSD Project can not fix all bugs in all software.
All FreeBSD documents are available for download at https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/doc/
Questions that are not answered by the
documentation may be
sent to <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>.
Send questions about this document to <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org>.