openSUSE:Bugreport GNOME
General
Reporting bugs to openSUSE is a crucial way for the user to help the community to improve the distribution. We recommend you to read openSUSE bug reporting guidelines and How to Report Bugs Effectively before reporting bugs for the GNOME component of openSUSE.
Before reporting
The issue you encountered might be a known problem or not an openSUSE specific bug. So before you report anything to https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/, please consider the following:
Make sure your system is fully updated
It is useful to get your system fully updated and check if you can still reproduce the bug.
Search for duplicates
For GNOME related bugs, the best practice to check if it is a known issue is to check these sites one by one:
GNOME upstream issue tracker
GNOME uses a GitLab instance to manage bug reports and feature requests. You can choose a specific project and search in the respective issue list or search globally. Since Leap uses an older version of GNOME, even Tumbleweed is to some extent behind the main branch. It is wise to check the upstream in the first place because your issue might already be spotted or fixed by the latest version.
openSUSE Bugzilla
- You can browse open bugs in GNOME for openSUSE Leap & Stable releases via this link
- You can browse open bugs in GNOME for openSUSE Tumbleweed via this link
- Or you can search directly in Bugzilla
Other forums and the internet
- Sometimes the issue is likely to be spotted by other users in the community: openSUSE forum
- Google or other handy search engines: Search using the program's name, version, and a relevant part of the error message, if any.
openSUSE or GNOME upstream
With their limited resources the openSUSE team has to focus on openSUSE-specific bugs/features. Further, they cannot be experts for every single application, so the maintainer of an application at https://gitlab.gnome.org/ is likely to have more knowledge and can fix things quicker.
Thus every non-openSUSE-specific bug, i.e. bugs that are valid for other distros as well, should have a report at https://gitlab.gnome.org/. In case it is a really important feature, like e.g. Bluetooth support not working at all, or a really important bug, which might already be fixed upstream, then it does make sense to file it downstream (at bugzilla.opensuse.org) too and add the upstream bug report into the URL field. That way the openSUSE team can keep track of showstoppers before a release and crucial fixes after a release.
If your upstream report is set to "fixed" and includes a patch, you should set your opensSUSE report from "upstream" to "confirmed" for the openSUSE developers to possibly backport the fix.
Guidelines to report bugs in GNOME upstream
Filing a bug
Collect logs for your bug report
Before collecting logs for your bug report you should
- Make sure the system is fully updated
- You can reproduce this issue
Then enable gdm debugging options, set the debug/Enable key to "true" in the /etc/gdm/custom.conf file and reboot your system. Collect logs by following these steps:
- Boot to your system
- Reproduce the issue
- Collect journalctl logs by `sudo journalctl -b > journalctl.txt`
- Provide the version of the malfunctioned packages, if you are uncertain about which package should be blamed, just provide `rpm -qa > rpm-qa.txt`
Step by step guide
- Choose the right product by following this guide
- Choose GNOME as the component
- Keep your bug summary succinct
- The description section should contain at least:
a. A general description b. Version of your system (snapshot number if you are using Tumbleweed), hardware environment c. Version of the malfunctioned packages, if you are uncertain about which package should be blamed, just provide `rpm -qa > rpm-qa.txt` collected in the above section d. Steps to reproduce the issue e. Expected behavior f. Actual behavior g. Related logs, generally you can provide `sudo journalctl -b > journalctl.txt` collected in the above section h. Attachment like screenshot if any
Follow up on filed bugs
It takes time for the maintainer to investigate the bug, you will get an email notification when they need your assistance to provide additional information or test a tentative fix. Please keep an eye on your mailbox or the bug report.
If you have further findings or resolve the issue by yourself, please also update the bug report.
Specific hints and tricks
Bugs spotted by openQA
openQA is an indispensable tool to facilitate openSUSE testing, however, the GNOME maintainer met quite some tricky bugs spotted by openQA and proved caused by the openQA performance or the testing script at last(especially for the Desktop testing). It is not convenient to debug in openQA directly. Therefore it is always wise to try to reproduce the issue manually in a physical machine or a virtual machine and provide this information in the bug report.
The maintainer could set the bug priority accordingly or get openQA experts involved.
Useful crash reports
If you want to or are asked to provide the stack trace for a GNOME crash, please see the following links: