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Date:      Mon, 19 Mar 2007 20:09:08 -0500
From:      linimon@lonesome.com (Mark Linimon)
To:        ports@FreeBSD.org, stable@FreeBSD.org
Cc:        bugmeister@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   [REMINDER] how to get the best use out of GNATS
Message-ID:  <20070320010908.GA4781@soaustin.net>

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Recently the bugbusting team has been seeing a few cases where PRs are
being submitted without a clear understanding of how best to do so.
Although there is a document that references this*, please let me reiterate
a few points:

 - Please only send one PR for a particular problem.  The mail queue
   and spam filtering take ~10 minutes to run (more if your address is
   greylisted) so you will not see an immediate email reply or update on
   the website.  Please wait a few hours before assuming that something
   has gone wrong; if you think it has, please email bugmeister@ and we
   will look at it.

 - Your email address has to have a valid reverse lookup to be accepted.
   If the machine you are submitting from does not have this, please
   acquire and use a free email account such as foo@yahoo.com.

 - Your email address will be public (in the database).  If you do not
   want this, please use a free email account.

 - If your email bounces, it is much less likely that someone is going to
   be able to contact you if they need futher information about your problem.

 - Please trim replies when following-up.  The database already has a copy.

 - Please do not use HTML mail.  The GNATS spam-filters are set up to
   assume that such mail is spam.  They are almost always correct.

 - Do not use content-type/quoted-printable.  This will merely scramble
   your patches into unusability.

 - Remember, your submissions are going into a database, so any email
   mangling is undesireable.

 - Submissions of more than 500k are quarantined as possible spam.  If
   your patch (or traceback) are that large, please consider posting
   them somewhere on the web and just submitting a URL.

 - The category for all ports is 'ports', not 'www' if your port is
   'www/foo', nor 'misc' if your port is 'misc/bar'.  This affects the
   automated systems that assign and track PRs.

 - In fact, the 'misc' category is almost always wrong.  Its only legitimate
   uses are for a few things such as build infrastructure and boot loader
   code.  If your problem is with the base system, it is almost certainly
   either kern or bin (unless you think it is particular to a processor
   or motherboard, in which case it is i386/amd64/etc.).

Thanks.

Mark Linimon, for the bugbusting team

*http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/problem-reports/article.html



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