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Writing FreeBSD Problem Reports $FreeBSD$ This article describes how to best formulate and submit a problem report to the FreeBSD Project. Dag-Erling Smørgrav Contributed by problem reports Introduction One of the most frustrating experiences one can have as a software user is to submit a problem report only to have it summarily closed with a terse and unhelpful explanation like not a bug or bogus PR. Similarly, one of the most frustrating experiences as a software developer is to be flooded with problem reports that are not really problem reports but requests for support, or that contain little or no information about what the problem is and how to reproduce it. This document attempts to describe how to write good problem reports. What, you ask, is a good problem report? Well, to go straight to the bottom line, a good problem report is one that can be analyzed and dealt with swiftly, to the mutual satisfaction of both user and developer. Although the primary focus of this article is on FreeBSD problem reports, most of it should apply quite well to other software projects. Note that this article is organized thematically, not chronologically, so you should read through the entire document before submitting a problem report, rather than treat it as a step-by-step tutorial. When to submit a problem report 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 you are convinced you have found a bug in a program when in fact you have misunderstood the syntax for a command or made a typo 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 you 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 feature request, for instance. So how do you determine what is a bug and what is not? As a simple rule of thumb your 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. Some cases where it may be appropriate to submit a problem report about something that is not a bug are: Requests for feature enhancements. It is generally a good idea to air these on the mailing lists before submitting a problem report. Notification of updates to externally maintained software (mainly ports, but also externally maintained base system components such as BIND or various GNU utilities). Another thing is that if the system on which you experienced the bug is not fairly up-to-date, you should seriously consider upgrading and trying to reproduce the problem on an up-to-date system before submitting a problem report. There are few things that will annoy a developer more than receiving a problem report about a bug she's already fixed. Finally, a bug that can not be reproduced can rarely be fixed. If the bug only occurred once and you can not 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's 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, and you should consider letting the matter drop. Preparations A good rule to follow is to always do a background search before submitting a problem report. Maybe your problem has already been reported; maybe it is being discussed on the mailing lists, or recently was; it may even already be fixed in a newer version than what you are running. You should therefore check all the obvious places before submitting your problem report. For FreeBSD, this means: The FAQ. The mailing lists—if you're not subscribed, use the searchable archives on the FreeBSD web site. If your problem has not been discussed on the lists, you might try posting a message about it and waiting a few days to see if someone can spot something you have overlooked. Optionally, the entire web—use your favorite search engine to locate any references to your problem. You may even get hits from archived mailing lists or newsgroups you did not know of or had not thought to search through. Finally, the FreeBSD PR database. Unless your problem is recent or obscure, there is a fair chance it has already been reported. Next, you need to make sure your problem report goes to the right people. The first catch here is that if the problem is a bug in - third-party software (a port or a package you've installed), you + third-party software (a port or a package you have installed), you should report the bug to the original author, not to the FreeBSD Project. There are two exceptions to this rule: the first is if the bug does not occur on other platforms, in which case the problem may lie in how the software was ported to FreeBSD; the second is if the original author has already fixed the bug and released a patch or a new version of his software, and the FreeBSD port has not been updated yet. The second catch is that FreeBSD's bug tracking system sorts problem reports according to the category the originator selected. Therefore, if you select the wrong category when you submit your problem report, there is a good chance that it will go unnoticed for a while, until someone re-categorizes it. Writing the problem report Now that you have decided that your issue merits a problem report, and that it is a FreeBSD problem, it is time to write the actual problem report. Make sure your VISUAL (or EDITOR if VISUAL is not set) environment variable is set to something sensible, and run &man.send-pr.1;. Attaching patches or files The &man.send-pr.1; program has provisions for attaching files to a problem report. You can attach as many files as you want provided that each has a unique base name (i.e. the name of the file proper, without the path). Just use the command-line option to specify the names of the files you wish to attach: &prompt.user; send-pr -a /var/run/dmesg -a /tmp/errors Don't worry about binary files; they will be automatically encoded so as not to upset your mail agent. If you attach a patch, make sure you use the or option to &man.diff.1; to create a context or unified diff, and make sure to specify the exact CVS revision numbers of the files you modified so the developers who read your report will be able to apply them easily. You should also take note that unless you explicitly specify otherwise in your PR, any patches you submit will be assumed to be licensed under the same terms as the original file you modified. Filling out the template The template consists of a list of fields, some of which are pre-filled, and some of which have comments explaining their purpose or listing acceptable values. Do not worry about the comments; they will be removed automatically if you do not modify them or remove them yourself. At the top of the template, below the SEND-PR: lines, are the email headers. You do not normally need to modify these, unless you are sending the problem report from a machine or account that can send but not receive mail, in which case you will want to set the From: and Reply-To: to your real email address. You may also want to send yourself (or someone else) a carbon copy of the problem report by adding one or more email addresses to the Cc: header. Next comes a series of single-line fields: Submitter-Id: Do not change this. The default value of current-users is correct, even if you run FreeBSD-STABLE. Originator: This is normally prefilled with the gecos field of the currently logged-in user. Please specify your real name, optionally followed by your email address in angle brackets. Organization: Whatever you feel like. This field is not used for anything significant. Confidential: This is prefilled to no; changing it makes no sense as there is no such thing as a confidential FreeBSD problem report—the PR database is distributed worldwide by CVSup. Synopsis: Fill this out with a short and accurate description of the problem. The synopsis is used as the subject of the problem report email, and is used in problem report listings and summaries; problem reports with obscure synopses tend to get ignored. If your problem report includes a patch, please have the synopsis start with [PATCH]. Severity: One of non-critical, serious or critical. Do not overreact; refrain from labeling your problem critical unless it really is (e.g. root exploit, easily reproducible panic). Developers tend to ignore this and the next field, precisely because problem report submitters tend to overrate their problems. Priority: One of low, medium or high. See above. Category: Choose one of the following: advocacy: problems relating to FreeBSD's public image. Rarely used. alpha: problems specific to the Alpha platform. bin: problems with userland programs in the base system. conf: problems with configuration files, default values etc. docs: problems with man pages or on-line documentation. gnu: problems with GNU software such as &man.gcc.1; or &man.grep.1;. i386: problems specific to the i386 platform. kern: problems with kernel. misc: anything that does not fit in any of the other categories. ports: problems relating to the ports tree. sparc: problems specific to the Sparc platform. Class: Choose one of the following: sw-bug: software bugs. doc-bug: errors in documentation. change-request: requests for additional features or changes in existing features. update: updates to ports or other contributed software. maintainer-update: updates to ports for which you are the maintainer. Release: The version of FreeBSD that you are running. This is filled out automatically by &man.send-pr.1; and need only be changed if you are sending a problem report from a different system than the one that exhibits the problem. Finally, there is a series of multi-line fields: Environment: This should describe, as accurately as possible, the environment in which the problem has been observed. This includes the operating system version, the version of the specific program or file that contains the problem, and any other relevant items such as system configuration, other installed software that influences the problem, etc.—quite simply everything a developer needs to know to reconstruct the environment in which the problem occurs. Description: A complete and accurate description of the problem you are experiencing. Try to avoid speculating about the causes of the problem unless you are certain that you are on the right track, as it may mislead a developer into making incorrect assumptions about the problem. How-To-Repeat: A summary of the actions you need to take to reproduce the problem. Fix: Preferably a patch, or at least a workaround (which not only helps other people with the same problem work around it, but may also help a developer understand the cause for the problem), but if you do not have any firm ideas for either, it's better to leave this field blank than to speculate. Sending off the problem report Once you are done filling out the template, have saved it, and exit your editor, &man.send-pr.1; will prompt you with s)end, e)dit or a)bort?. You can then hit s to go ahead and submit the problem report, e to restart the editor and make further modifications, or a to abort. If you choose the latter, your problem report will remain on disk (&man.send-pr.1; will tell you the filename before it terminates), so you can edit it at your leisure, or maybe transfer it to a system with better net connectivity, before sending it with the to &man.send-pr.1;: &prompt.user; send-pr -f ~/my-problem-report This will read the specified file, validate the contents, strip comments and send it off. Follow-up Once your problem report has been filed, you will receive a confirmation by email which will include the tracking number that was assigned to your problem report and a URL you can use to check its status. With a little luck, someone will take an interest in your problem and try to address it, or, as the case may be, explain why it is not a problem. You will be automatically notified of any change of status, and you will receive copies of any comments or patches someone may attach to your problem report's audit trail. If someone requests additional information from you, or you remember or discover something you did not mention in the initial report, just mail it to bug-followup@FreeBSD.org, making sure that the tracking number is included in the subject so the bug tracking system will know what problem report to attach it to. If the problem report remains open after the problem has gone away, just send a follow-up (in the manner prescribed above) saying that the problem report can be closed, and, if possible, explaining how or when the problem was fixed. Further Reading This is a list of resources relevant to the proper writing and processing of problem reports. It is by no means complete. How to Report Bugs Effectively—an excellent essay by Simon G. Tatham on composing useful (non-FreeBSD-specific) problem reports.
diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/releng-packages/article.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/releng-packages/article.sgml index 9cd9a307fc..44854d9e7c 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/releng-packages/article.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/releng-packages/article.sgml @@ -1,370 +1,370 @@ %man; %teams; %freebsd; %authors; ]>
FreeBSD Release Engineering for Third Party Software Packages Steve Price
steve@FreeBSD.org
 $FreeBSD$ This paper describes the approach used by the FreeBSD release engineering team to produce a high quality package set suitable for official FreeBSD release media. This document is a work in progress, but eventually it will cover the process used to build a clean package set on the FreeBSD.org "Ports Cluster", how to configure any other set of machines as a ports cluster, how to split up the packages for the release media, and how to verify that a package set is consistent. Building packages from the Ports Collection The FreeBSD Ports collection is a collection of over &os.numports; third-party software packages available for FreeBSD. The &a.portmgr; is responsible for maintaining a consistent ports tree that can be used to create the binary packages that accompany a given FreeBSD release. The Ports Cluster In order to provide a consistent set of third-party packages for FreeBSD releases, every port is built in a separate chroot environment, starting with an empty /usr/local and /usr/X11R6. The requisite dependencies are installed as packages before the build proceeds. This enforces consistency in the package build process. By starting the package build in a pristine environment, we can assure that the package metadata (such as required dependencies) is accurate, and so we will never generate packages that might work on some systems and not on others depending on what software was previously installed. The Ports Cluster for the x86 architecture currently consists of a master node (Dual Pentium III 733Mhz) and 8 slave nodes (Pentium III 800Mhz) to do the actual package builds. With this configuration, a complete package build takes over 24 hours. These machines are co-located with the other FreeBSD Project equipment at Yahoo's corner of Exodus in Santa Clara, CA. The Ports Cluster for the Alpha architecture consists of 7 PWS 500A machines donated by Compaq and also co-located with Yahoo's facilities. The Package Split For FreeBSD 4.4 over 4.1 gigabytes of packages were created. This causes a problem for CDROM distributions because we would like to ship as many packages as possible without making the user insert another disc to satisfy dependencies. The solution is to create clusters of like packages with similar dependencies and group these onto specific discs. This section describes the software and methodology used to create those package sets for the official FreeBSD release discs. First off you'll need to get a copy of the tarball from the following URL : Copy thisc archive to a machine that has enough free HD space to hold 2 to 3 times the size of the package set that you wish to split. The tarball will extract into the current - working directory so make sure you've created one suitably named + working directory so make sure you have created one suitably named directory for the release you are working on. - After you've extracted the files, you will notice the + After you have extracted the files, you will notice the following files : config This file contains the free space on each disc and whether packages, distfiles, or both are allowed on any given disc. The first column is the disc name. It must be of the form disc[0-9a-z]. Currently it is setup to allow for 10 discs (4 for the release set and 6 for the toolkit). There's an implied extra disc called scratch where all of the remaining distfiles/packages land if they don't fit elsewhere. The second column can be either a 1 or 0 where 1 says that it is okay to place packages on this disc. The third column works the same way except that it controls whether distfiles are placed on this disc. The last column denotes the number of bytes of free space on a disc. doit.sh This is the workhorse. Once you have all the files in place and things properly configured this script directs the process of splitting packages. Beware it is interactive so you need to keep an eye on it as it runs. More details on what happens in this script will follow. scripts/checkdeps.pl Makes sure all packages dependencies are satisfied given an INDEX file and a directory of packages. scripts/oneshot.pl This is where all the magic (and I use that term loosely as it is mostly just a brute force approach) happens. Given a list of required packages for each disc and a set of packages/distfiles this is the script that places a package or distfile on a disc along with all of its dependencies. scripts/print-cdrom-packages.sh This file is a copy of src/release/scripts/print-cdrom-packages.sh from the release you are working on. scripts/scrubindex.pl This script removes lines from an INDEX file for packages that aren't present. It also removes the XFree86 dependencies. NOTE: you'll need to tweak the value of the xdep variable to make sure the version number is correct. scripts/setup.sh This is a helper script that I use on the bento cluster to grab a copy of the ports tree and the matching set of the packages/distfiles. Here's a checklist of things you'll need to check or configure before going any further. Edit config to denote the number of discs you have, their sizes, and whether you want them want to contain packages, distfiles, both, or neither. Make sure you remove the gen directory if there's an old one laying around. This directory contains working files that will only be valid for the current split. On your first pass through a split it is best to fake the copying of packages and distfiles. This will save both time and diskspace while you do a couple of trial runs to make sure things fit, etc. In the scripts/oneshot.pl set the fake variable to 1 and instead of actually copying the files it will &man.touch.1; them. Be sure you turn this off or set fake to 0 before you give the resultant discs to the person that will be mastering the discs otherwise they'll get a directory full of zero-sized files. Make sure you have a recent copy of the print-cdrom-packages.sh and that it is from the correct release. Check to make sure the XFree86 dependency in scripts/scrubindex.pl has the correct version number. You'll also need to make sure this value is correct in doit.sh as well. Next you'll need to get a copy of the ports tree, packages, and distfiles from a recent build on the package cluster. See the scripts/setup.sh for a working example but essentially here's what needs to be done. Grab a copy of ports.tar.gz and extract it into the ports directory alongside doit.sh and the scripts directory. Remove the packages/distfiles directories or symlinks. Bento has these as symlinks and you'll have mixed results if you don't get rid of them before proceeding. Create a new ports/packages directory and copy the package set from the package building cluster. Create a new ports/distfiles directory and copy the distfiles from the package building cluster. NOTE: if you don't want any distfiles simply create the directory and leave it empty. This directory must be present even if it doesn't contain anything. Now we're finally ready for the fun task of actually splitting the packages. You start the processing by running ./doit.sh. The first time you run it here's what it does. Create a list of the restricted (can't be on the master FTP site) ports. Asks you if you'd like to remove the restricted ports. Most of the time you'll want to answer (y)es here. Create a list of the packages/distfiles that can't be put on the discs. Asks you if you'd like to remove the non-cdromable packages/distfiles. Most of the time you'll want to answer (y)es here. Copies the INDEX from the ports directory to the gen directory. In doing so it removes the lines for ports where the packages don't exist. It also checks to make sure that all of the required dependency packages are present. Create a list of packages that are required on each disc. Asks you if you'd like to populate the discs. After populating each disc it will check for missing dependencies, scrub the INDEX file, and create the CHECKSUM.MD5 file. Check to make sure the required packages made it on each disc and gives you a summary of the sizes of each disc. After going through this the first time if you are lucky enough that all of the required packages built and fit on each disc. All you need to do is set fake to 0 in scripts/oneshot.pl and re-run ./doit.sh. The second and subsequent times around it will skip steps 1-5 above. If you want to re-run any of those steps refer to doit.sh for which files need to be removed to not short-circuit those steps. If you want to repeat all of these steps then the easiest way is to rm -rf gen. Upon successful completion the packages/distfiles will be in the disc* directories and the leftover will be in the scratch directory. What to do if things go wrong? Here's some common gotchas and workarounds. Missing required packages This is a pretty common occurrence. You'll either need to wait for a new set of packages where the missing packages were built or get someone to re-start the package build for you. DO NOT attempt to build the missing packages on your own machine and add them into the fray. While you might be able to get away with this if you are extremely careful the vast majority of the time you'll miss some little detail and the simple process of adding a package could make hundreds of others come up mysteriously broken. Required packages won't fit This happens on occasion too and is relatively easy to fix. Simply edit print-cdrom-packages.sh to move packages around until they fit. Yes this is an iterative process and one of the reasons why you should enable fake in - scripts/oneshot.pl until you've gotten + scripts/oneshot.pl until you have gotten things the way you want them. Re-run ./doit.sh after you made your adjustments. Required packages not on the right (or any) disc This usually means you didn't add them to print-cdrom-packages.sh or you put them on the wrong disc. This script is the gospel by which this whole process determines where a package must be. If you want to force a package to land on a particular disc this is the only way to ensure that it will happen. If you get completely stuck and can't figure out why things are borked or how to fix them then email &a.steve; for assistance.