4. Types of Problem Reports

4.1. Unassigned PRs

When PRs arrive, they are initially assigned to a generic (placeholder) assignee. These are always prepended with freebsd-. The exact value for this default depends on the category; in most cases, it corresponds to a specific FreeBSD mailing list. Here is the current list, with the most common ones listed first:

Do not be surprised to find that the submitter of the PR has assigned it to the wrong category. If you fix the category, do not forget to fix the assignment as well. (In particular, our submitters seem to have a hard time understanding that just because their problem manifested on an i386 system, that it might be generic to all of FreeBSD, and thus be more appropriate for kern. The converse is also true, of course.)

Certain PRs may be reassigned away from these generic assignees by anyone. There are several types of assignees: specialized mailing lists; mail aliases (used for certain limited-interest items); and individuals.

For assignees which are mailing lists, please use the long form when making the assignment (e.g., freebsd-foo instead of foo); this will avoid duplicate emails sent to the mailing list.

Here is a sample list of such entities; it is probably not complete.

Ports PRs which have a maintainer who is a ports committer may be reassigned by anyone (but note that not every FreeBSD committer is necessarily a ports committer, so you cannot simply go by the email address alone.)

For other PRs, please do not reassign them to individuals (other than yourself) unless you are certain that the assignee really wants to track the PR. This will help to avoid the case where no one looks at fixing a particular problem because everyone assumes that the assignee is already working on it.

4.2. Assigned PRs

If a PR has the responsible field set to the username of a FreeBSD developer, it means that the PR has been handed over to that particular person for further work.

Assigned PRs should not be touched by anyone but the assignee or bugmeister. If you have comments, submit a followup. If for some reason you think the PR should change state or be reassigned, send a message to the assignee. If the assignee does not respond within two weeks, unassign the PR and do as you please.

4.3. Duplicate PRs

If you find more than one PR that describe the same issue, choose the one that contains the largest amount of useful information and close the others, stating clearly the number of the superseding PR. If several PRs contain non-overlapping useful information, submit all the missing information to one in a followup, including references to the others; then close the other PRs (which are now completely superseded).

4.4. Stale PRs

A PR is considered stale if it has not been modified in more than six months. Apply the following procedure to deal with stale PRs:

• If the PR contains sufficient detail, try to reproduce the problem in -CURRENT and -STABLE. If you succeed, submit a followup detailing your findings and try to find someone to assign it to. Set the state to “analyzed” if appropriate.

• If the PR describes an issue which you know is the result of a usage error (incorrect configuration or otherwise), submit a followup explaining what the originator did wrong, then close the PR with the reason “User error” or “Configuration error”.

• If the PR describes an error which you know has been corrected in both -CURRENT and -STABLE, close it with a message stating when it was fixed in each branch.

• If the PR describes an error which you know has been corrected in -CURRENT, but not in -STABLE, try to find out when the person who corrected it is planning to MFC it, or try to find someone else (maybe yourself?) to do it. Set the state to “patched” and assign it to whomever will do the MFC.

• In other cases, ask the originator to confirm if the problem still exists in newer versions. If the originator does not reply within a month, close the PR with the notation “Feedback timeout”.

4.5. Misfiled PRs

GNATS is picky about the format of a submitted bug report. This is why a lot of PRs end up being “misfiled” if the submitter forgets to fill in a field or puts the wrong sort of data in some of the PR fields. This section aims to provide most of the necessary details for FreeBSD developers that can help them to close or refile these PRs.

When GNATS cannot deduce what to do with a problem report that reaches the database, it sets the responsible of the PR to gnats-admin and files it under the pending category. This is now a “misfiled” PR and will not appear in bug report listings, unless someone explicitly asks for a list of all the misfiled PRs. If you have access to the FreeBSD cluster machines, you can use query-pr to view a listing of PRs that have been misfiled:

% query-pr -x -q -r gnats-admin
   52458 gnats-ad   open      serious   medium    Re: declaration clash f
   52510 gnats-ad   open      serious   medium    Re: lots of sockets in
   52557 gnats-ad   open      serious   medium
   52570 gnats-ad   open      serious   medium    Jigdo maintainer update

Commonly PRs like the ones shown above are misfiled for one of the following reasons:

• A followup to an existing PR, sent through email, has the wrong format on its Subject: header.

• A submitter sent a Cc: to a mailing list and someone followed up to that post instead of the email issued by GNATS after processing. The email to the list will not have the category/PRnumber tracking tag. (This is why we discourage submitters from doing this exact thing.)

• When completing the send-pr(1) template, the submitter forgot to set the category or class of the PR to a proper value.

• When completing the send-pr(1) template, the submitter set Confidential to yes. (Since we allow anyone to mirror GNATS via cvsup, our PRs are public information. Security alerts should therefore not be sent via GNATS but instead via email to the Security Team.)

• It is not a real PR, but some random message sent to <[email protected]> or <[email protected]>.

Subject: Re: category/number: old synopsis text

Your problem report was misfiled.  Please use the format
"Subject: category/number: original text" when following
up to older, existing PRs.  I've added the relevant bits
from the body of this PR to kern/12345

% query-pr -q -y "some text"

% query-pr -F 52458 52474 > mbox

Followup to ports/45364 misfiled as a new PR.
This was misfiled because the subject did not have the format:

    Re: ports/45364: ...