NAME
    AdminFAQ - The Perl Bug Administrator FAQ

DESCRIPTION
    Frequently Asked Questions related to Perl Bug Administration.

    $Revision: 1.4 $ $Date: 2002/01/11 13:51:06 $

This FAQ
    This FAQ is intended for use by the perlbug administrators. The latest
    version can be found at
    http://bugs.perl.org/admin/perlbug.cgi?req=adminfaq. If you have any
    comments or patches to this document, please send them to the author at
    the address below.

Who are the perl bugmongers?
    The perl bugmongers are the Perl Bug Adminstrators. Some of these people
    are active Perl Porters, others are just interested in learning or
    helping out.

What do the bugmongers do?
    * Clean up old bugs

    * Organize/categorize and assign new bugs

    * Discuss better ways for dealing with perl bugs

What is the lifecycle of a perl bug?
    1 A bug report is submitted with the "perlbug" program to one of the
      following addresses:

              perlbug@perl.org
              perlbug@perl.com
              macperlbug@perl.org
              perl-win32-porters@perl.org
              module-bug@perl.org

      Mail to these addresses is forwarded to a program called
      "perlbugtron".

    2 A tracking number is automatically generated by "perlbugtron", and the
      message is forwarded to perl5-porters@perl.org (or
      macperl-porters@macperl.org for Mac bug reports, or
      perl-win32-porters@activestate.com for Windows bug reports.)

    3 A discusion ensues on p5p regarding a solution for the bug. During
      this time, a perlbug admin should categorize the bug, and possibly
      assign it.

    4 One or more solutions are proposed, and one is approved by consensus
      and/or the pumpking.

    5 A perlbug admin marks the bug as closed.

How do I close a bug?
    This process varies depending on the age of the bug. There are many bugs
    in the bug database dating back several years. Many of these bugs have
    already been solved in recent version of perl. These are old bugs.

    Everything else is a new bug.

    (Another way to make this distinction is this: Anything that requires
    the attention of p5p is a new bug.)

  How does a non-administrator close a bug?

    They can send an email to admins@bugs.perl.org with your suggestions, or
    to "propose_close_<bugid>@bugs.perl.org" where "<bugid>" is the the bug
    ID of the bug you want to close.

  How do I close an *old* bug?

    1 Perform the necessary tests to prove it has been solved.

    2 Make an entry in the bug database noting the reason you are closing
      it. This can be as simple as "fixed in perl 5.6.0 (tested on Jul 17
      2000)".

      The easiest way to make this entry is to send a message to
      close_<bugid>@bugs.perl.org, where the content of the message is the
      log entry.

  How do I close a *new* bug?

    If there has been a thread on p5p culminating in a patch (or some other
    final looking statement), mark the bug as closed. You may wish to add a
    comment along the lines of "resolved in <msgid>"

When do I delete a bug?
    Bugs should rarely be deleted. There may be times when a bug should not
    be in the database, for example, spam that may have gotten through, or
    an exact duplicate of another bug report. (And in the duplicate case,
    it's probably better to link the bug to the other copy, to make sure the
    threads keep properly, if there has been discussion under both ids.)

I don't want to bother p5p with a bug related email.  How do I get it into the database?
    Send (or CC) the email to track@bugs.perl.org. Your message must have a
    subject line that contains "[ID <bugid>]", where "<bugid>" is the bug ID
    number.

What versions of perl should I check for bugs to have been fixed in?
    Generally, you should check 5.00503, 5.6.1, perl-current, and
    perl-5.6.x-current. Theoretically, once it works in an earlier version,
    it will work in all future versions, but it can't hurt to perform the
    regression test by hand.

Web Interface: Those Checkboxes
    Discussed in bugmongers Message-id: <397466D6.6F05E8B8@m.dasa.de>

    The perlbugtron user interface has a lot of checkboxes. When you modify
    an item, you need to check the box for that item. Otherwise, when you
    click "update", nothing will happen and you will receive an error
    message.

    The page you get back after altering bugs will only have the bugs
    checked on it. So if you have a list of 25 bugs, and you edit 3 of them,
    the page you receive will have only these 3 bugs in it. This is so it is
    easier to check that your changes were entered correctly.

Why is the note text displayed *outside* of the textarea?
    The note is displayed outside of the text area so you can add a new note
    *in* the textarea. If there's more than one note, the form will contain
    links to all the notes instead of the actual note texts.

What is the *abandoned* status for?
    The *abandoned* status means: "This bug probably cannot be fixed. We may
    come back to fix it after all the other bugs have been resolved."

    Bugs are very rarely abandoned without good reason.

    As of this writing, bugs in the pre-5.6 install process are being
    abandoned. The installation system changed a lot for 5.6, and many
    issues were resolved.

How do I get more help?
    To get more help on the email interface, send a message with the subject
    "-h" to bugdb@perl.org. For more detailed help, use "-H";

    Or you can use http://bugs.perl.org/perlbug.cgi?req=mailhelp

    The definitive location for more help on the web interface is

    http://bugs.perl.org/admin/perlbug.cgi?req=webhelp for administrators
    and http://bugs.perl.org/perlbug.cgi?req=webhelp for normal users

AUTHOR
    Robert Spier <rspier at cpan.org>

THANKS
    Mark-Jason Dominus

    Richard Foley

