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<TITLE>BUG REPORTING POLICY **** PLEASE READ ****</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Monaco, Courier New"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>Greetings FreeSWITCH users...<BR>
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It has come to my attention that many users are not properly reporting bugs.<BR>
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Contrary to popular belief, the mailing lists is not where we report bugs. We have <a href="http://jira.freeswitch.org">http://jira.freeswitch.org</a> for this function.<BR>
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Why should you open a jira? The developers have a hard enough time keeping track of their day jobs on top of all the requests for help that come in to the mailing lists.<BR>
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Yes we have a good list of users that help out on the mailing list and I would like to extend thanks to those that do. However, the mailing list can be quite busy at times and your bug report there quite frankly can and will get missed.<BR>
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Jira on the other hand is a proper issue tracking system. It allows us (the FreeSWITCH developers) keep up with your issues. On top of that, we don’t have to go thru days if not weeks of emails to see the entire trail of what has happened with a specific issue. It also gives you a place to attach files to help us diagnose/fix the issue. Maybe you see the issue can be fixed with a simple patch (ok, maybe its not a simple patch). Attaching your patch there makes sure it doesn’t get lost in the mix. <BR>
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Worried about duplicate reports that someone might have already opened? That’s ok use Jira’s search functions. If you find one that’s already open that matches your needs and you see something that can contribute to fixing the problem, update it with a note. If for some reason we determine its a dup of another issue in jira, we can link them together and close the dups.<BR>
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Now, that leads us to another important issue. How do we get the information the developers really need to see? We have a pretty good wiki page on this at <a href="http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Reporting_Bugs">http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Reporting_Bugs</a> <BR>
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Also, we see all the time on the mailing list someone has added a new feature or module they would like to get into tree. Again, creating a Jira and attaching the patch lets us track that feature. (Of course there are other ways to deal with this beyond the scope of this email)<BR>
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Help us help you. Remember its open source, that means you get the software for free, in return, you can help yourself and the project in general by following these simple steps.<BR>
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Ken </SPAN></FONT>
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