History

OUTDATED Replaced with Bugs, Features and Issues

Bugreports - the redmine style

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

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.

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.

Opening a Ticket

Before filing a bug

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 existing 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.

Plugin bugs

Plugin bugs must be opened in their respective bug tracking system. Check first if the plugin is listed at http://hub.qgis.org/projects/qgis-user-plugins/
If so, click on the plugin name then click "New issue". Otherwise, consult the plugin documentation to find the address of the relevant bug tracking system or a developer to contact.

Steps

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 think 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). A very important thing when reporting a bug is to boil down a minimum example that is needed to reproduce the bug. The chances of a bug being addressed in a timely manner is directly related to the speed with which the developer can reproduce the bug. If you make that hard for the developer, chances are the bug will be given up on or ignored for quite a while.
  • Priority - provide an estimate of the severity of the problem
    • Low - a problem which doesn't affect QGIS usefulness.
    • Normal - the default value, applicable to most bugs and nearly all feature requests.
    • High - a bug which has a major effect on the usability of a package.
    • Blocker - a bug that makes QGIS totally unusable, causes serious data loss or a regression from a previous QGIS version.
  • 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

Before sending the bug, please check the formatting of your report by clicking on "Preview". Please avoid editing existing reports, if not for typos. Better add further comments in any other case.

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.

Log output on Windows

The nightly build in OSGeo4W (package qgis-dev) is built with debugging output, that you can view with DebugView. If the problem is not easy to reproduce the output might shed some light about where QGIS crashes.

Creating a patch

To be done