QGIS » QGIS Desktop

h1. Bugreports - the redmine style

This page summarizes how to use redmine with QGIS and provides links to specific information about features and operating procedures.

h2. Login

You must have an OSGeo account and login in order to submit bug reports. To get started, first  create an OSGeo account.

https://www2.osgeo.org/cgi-bin/ldap_create_user.py

Once you have your account, use http://hub.qgis.org/projects/quantum-gis/issues to login and search if the issue you'd like to report is probably already entered.

h2. Tickets

Tickets are used to report bugs, request enhancements and submit patches. Redmine is more than a bug reporting system. Tickets can be associated with a  QGIS Milestone, allowing you to see progress towards completion. Completion of a Milestone not only requires closing bugs, but completing other tasks related to a release such as documentation, web site updates, packaging, and announcements.

h2. Opening a Ticket

Before filing a bug, review the currently open issues to make sure that you aren't creating a duplicate. If you have additional information on an issue, you can add it to the ticket. Third party plugins might also cause problems. If you have installed any, you should also verify that the problem is still reproducible without them.

Please don't report multiple unrelated bugs in a single bug report.

To report a bug choose New Issue from the menu bar. Note: You can also request an enhancement or submit a patch using the Ticket system.

Important information needed when opening a ticket:

* Tracker - choose the ticket type from the drop-down list

** Bug - bug

** Feature - new feature request

** Bounty - ticket for which a bounty has been defined

* Subject - a short description of the issue

* Description

Provide a full description of the problem including steps to repeat it; if you tink the bug could be related to a certain platform version or dependencies package version (GDAL, OGR, GEOS etc) include that as well.

If your QGIS crashes if might be useful to include a backtrace (see below) 

* Priority - provide an estimate of the severity of the problem

** Low - a problem which doesn't affect QGIS usefulness, and is presumably trivial to fix.

** Normal - the default value, applicable to most bugs.

** High - a bug which has a major effect on the usability of a package, without rendering it completely unusable to everyone.

** Urgent - makes QGIS unusable or mostly so, or causes data loss.

** Immediate - makes QGIS  totally unusable, or causes serious data loss.

* Component - Choose the aspect of the application that is most closely associated with the problem

* Milestone - If this issue affects a particular Milestone in the project choose it from the drop-down list

* Version of QGIS this issue affects

* Platform - Choose the platform you are using 

h2. Creating a backtrace

If you have a crash it might be useful to include a backtrace as the bug might be not reproducible on an other machine. On Unix you can create a backtrace using a core dump and gdb. A core dump is a memory dump of the state of the process when the crash happened.

Depending on you distribution the automatic creation of core dumps might be disabled. In that case you only see for instance Segmentation fault and not Segmentation fault (core dumped) in the shell you started QGIS from and you need to run ulimit -c unlimited before starting QGIS. You could also include that in your .profile.

Start qgis from the shell and repeat the steps to reproduce the crash. After the crash the core file will be located in the current directory.

To produce a backtrace from it you start gdb /path/to/the/qgis/binary core. The binary is usually /usr/bin/qgis or /usr/bin/qgis.bin on Debian with the GRASS plugin installed.

In gdb you run bt which will produce the backtrace.

h2. Creating a patch

To be done