putty-source/doc/feedback.but

\versionid $Id: feedback.but,v 1.3 2002/03/23 18:59:46 simon Exp $

\A{feedback} Feedback and bug reporting

This is a guide to providing feedback to the PuTTY development team.
It is provided as both a web page on the PuTTY site, and an appendix
in the PuTTY manual.

\K{feedback-general} gives some general guidelines for sending any
kind of e-mail to the development team. Following sections give more
specific guidelines for particular types of e-mail, such as bug
reports and feature requests.

\H{feedback-general} General guidelines

The PuTTY development team gets a \e{lot} of mail. If you can
possibly solve your own problem by reading the manual, reading the
FAQ, reading the web site, asking a fellow user, perhaps posting on
the newsgroup \W{news:comp.security.ssh}\c{comp.security.ssh}, or
some other means, then it would make our lives much easier.

If the volume of e-mail really gets on top of us and we can't find
time to answer it all, then the first e-mails we discard will be the
ones from people who don't look as if they have made a reasonable
effort to solve their own problems. This is not intended to cause
offence; it's occasionally a necessary response to a serious
problem. We get a \e{lot} of e-mail. Really.

Also, the PuTTY contact email address is a mailing list. For this
reason, e-mails larger than 40Kb will be held for inspection by the
list administrator, and will not be allowed through unless they
really appear to be worth their large size. Therefore:

\b Don't send your bug report as a Word document. Word documents are
roughly fifty times larger than writing the same report in plain
text. In addition, most of the PuTTY team read their e-mail on Unix
machines, so copying the attachment to a Windows box to run Word is
very inconvenient. Not only that, but several of us don't even
\e{have} a copy of Word!

\b Don't mail large screen shots without checking with us first.
Sending a screen shot of an error box is almost certainly
unnecessary when you could just tell us in plain text what the error
was. Sending a full-screen shot is sometimes useful, but it's
probably still wise to check with us before sending it.

\b If you want to send us a screen shot, or any other kind of large
data file, it is much more convenient for us if you can put the file
on a web site and send us the URL. That way (a) we don't have to
download it at all if it doesn't look necessary; and (b) only one
member of the team needs to download it, instead of it being
automatically sent to everyone on the mailing list.

\b If you \e{must} mail a screen shot, don't send it as a \cw{.BMP}
file. \cw{BMP}s have no compression and they are \e{much} larger
than other image formats such as PNG, TIFF and GIF. Convert the file
to a properly compressed image format before sending it.

(Note that although the PuTTY contact address is a mailing list, the
archives aren't publicly available, so you shouldn't be letting
yourself in for any spam by sending us mail.)

\H{feedback-bugs} Reporting bugs

If you think you have found a bug in PuTTY, your first steps should
be:

\b Check the
\W{http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist.html}{Wishlist
page} on the PuTTY website, and see if we already know about the
problem. If we do, it is almost certainly not necessary to mail us
about it, unless you think you have extra information that might be
helpful to us in fixing it. (Of course, if we actually \e{need}
specific extra information about a particular bug, the Wishlist page
will say so.)

\b Check the
\W{http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/changes.html}{Change
Log} on the PuTTY website, and see if we have already fixed the bug
in the development snapshots.

\b Check the
\W{http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/faq.html}{FAQ}
on the PuTTY website (also provided as \k{faq} in the manual), and
see if it answers your question. The FAQ lists the most common
things which people think are bugs, but which aren't bugs.

\b Download the latest development snapshot and see if the problem
still happens with that. This really is worth doing. As a general
rule we aren't very interested in bugs that appear in the release
version but not in the development version, because that usually
means they are bugs we have \e{already fixed}. On the other hand, if
you can find a bug in the development version that doesn't appear in
the release, that's likely to be a new bug we've introduced since
the release and we're definitely interested in it.

If none of those options solved your problem, and you still need to
report a bug to us, it is useful if you include some general
information:

\b Tell us what version of PuTTY you are running. To find this out,
use the "About PuTTY" option from the System menu. Please \e{do not}
just tell us \q{I'm running the latest version}; e-mail can be
delayed and it may not be obvious which version was the latest at
the time you sent the message. 

\b Tell us what version of what OS you are running PuTTY on.

\b Tell us what protocol you are connecting with: SSH, Telnet,
Rlogin or Raw mode.

\b Tell us what kind of server you are connecting to; what OS, and
if possible what SSH server (if you're using SSH). You can get some
of this information from the PuTTY Event Log (see \k{using-eventlog}
in the manual).

\b Send us the contents of the PuTTY Event Log, unless you
have a specific reason not to (for example, if it contains
confidential information that you think we should be able to solve
your problem without needing to know).

\b Try to give us as much information as you can to help us
see the problem for ourselves. If possible, give us a step-by-step
sequence of \e{precise} instructions for reproducing the fault.

\b Don't just tell us that PuTTY \q{does the wrong thing}; tell us
exactly and precisely what it did, and also tell us exactly and
precisely what you think it should have done instead. Some people
tell us PuTTY does the wrong thing, and it turns out that it was
doing the right thing and their expectations were wrong. Help to
avoid this problem by telling us exactly what you think it should
have done, and exactly what it did do.

\b If you think you can, you're welcome to try to fix the problem
yourself. A patch to the code which fixes a bug is an excellent
addition to a bug report. However, a patch is never a \e{substitute}
for a good bug report; if your patch is wrong or inappropriate, and
you haven't supplied us with full information about the actual bug,
then we won't be able to find a better solution.

\b
\W{http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html}\cw{http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html}
is an article on how to report bugs effectively in general. If your
bug report is \e{particularly} unclear, we may ask you to go away,
read this article, and then report the bug again.

\H{feedback-features} Requesting extra features 

If you want to request a new feature in PuTTY, the very first things
you should do are:

\b Check the
\W{http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist.html}{Wishlist
page} on the PuTTY website, and see if your feature is already on
the list. If it is, it probably won't achieve very much to repeat
the request. (But see \k{feedback-feature-priority} if you want to
persuade us to give your particular feature higher priority.)

\b Check the
\W{http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/changes.html}{Change
Log} on the PuTTY website, and see if we have already added your
feature in the development snapshots. If it isn't clear, download
the latest development snapshot and see if the feature is present.
If it is, then it will also be in the next release and there is no
need to mail us at all.

If you can't find your feature in either the development snapshots
\e{or} the Wishlist, then you probably do need to submit a feature
request. Since the PuTTY authors are very busy, it helps if you try
to do some of the work for us:

\b Do as much of the design as you can. Think about \q{corner
cases}; think about how your feature interacts with other existing
features. Think about the user interface; if you can't come up with
a simple and intuitive interface to your feature, you shouldn't be
surprised if we can't either. Always imagine whether it's possible
for there to be more than one, or less than one, of something you'd
assumed there would be one of. (For example, if you were to want
PuTTY to put an icon in the System tray rather than the Taskbar, you
should think about what happens if there's more than one PuTTY
active; how would the user tell which was which?)

\b If you can program, it may be worth offering to write the feature
yourself and send us a patch. However, it is likely to be helpful
if you confer with us first; there may be design issues you haven't
thought of, or we may be about to make big changes to the code which
your patch would clash with, or something. If you check with the
maintainers first, there is a better chance of your code actually
being usable.

\H{feedback-feature-priority} Requesting features that have already
been requested

If a feature is already listed on the Wishlist, then it usually
means we would like to add it to PuTTY at some point. However, this
may not be in the near future. If there's a feature on the Wishlist
which you would like to see in the \e{near} future, there are
several things you can do to try to increase its priority level:

\b Mail us and vote for it. (Be sure to mention that you've seen it
on the Wishlist, or we might think you haven't even \e{read} the
Wishlist). This probably won't have very \e{much} effect; if a huge
number of people vote for something then it may make a difference,
but one or two extra votes for a particular feature are unlikely to
change our priority list immediately. Also, don't expect a reply.

\b Offer us money if we do the work sooner rather than later. This
sometimes works, but not always. The PuTTY team all have full-time
jobs and we're doing all of this work in our free time; we may
sometimes be willing to give up some more of our free time in
exchange for some money, but if you try to bribe us for a \e{big}
feature it's entirely possible that we simply won't have the time to
spare - whether you pay us or not. (Also, we don't accept bribes to
add \e{bad} features to the Wishlist, because our desire to provide
high-quality software to the users comes first.)

\b Offer to help us write the code. This is probably the \e{only}
way to get a feature implemented quickly, if it's a big one that we
don't have time to do ourselves.

\H{feedback-webadmin} Web server administration

If the PuTTY web site is down (Connection Timed Out), please don't
bother mailing us to tell us about it. Most of us read our e-mail on
the same machines that host the web site, so if those machines are
down then we will notice \e{before} we read our e-mail. So there's
no point telling us our servers are down.

Of course, if the web site has some other error (Connection Refused,
404 Not Found, 403 Forbidden, or something else) then we might
\e{not} have noticed and it might still be worth telling us about it.

\H{feedback-permission} Asking permission for things

PuTTY is distributed under the MIT Licence (see \k{licence} for
details). This means you can do almost \e{anything} you like with
our software, our source code, and our documentation. The only
things you aren't allowed to do are to remove our copyright notices
or the licence text itself, or to hold us legally responsible if
something goes wrong.

So if you want permission to include PuTTY on a magazine cover disk,
or as part of a collection of useful software on a CD or a web site,
then \e{permission is already granted}. You don't have to mail us
and ask. Just go ahead and do it. We don't mind.

If you want to use parts of the PuTTY source code in another
program, then it might be worth mailing us to talk about technical
details, but if all you want is to ask permission then you don't
need to bother. You already have permission.

\H{feedback-mirrors} Mirroring the PuTTY web site

All mirrors of the PuTTY web site are welcome. Please don't bother
asking us for permission before setting up a mirror. You already
have permission. We are always happy to have more mirrors.

If you mail us \e{after} you have set up the mirror, and remember to
let us know which country your mirror is in, then we'll add it to
the
\W{http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/mirrors.html}{Mirrors
page} on the PuTTY website.

If you have technical questions about the process of mirroring, then
you might want to mail us before setting up the mirror; but if you
just want to ask for permission, you don't need to. You already have
permission.

\H{feedback-compliments} Praise and compliments

One of the most rewarding things about maintaining free software is
getting e-mails that just say \q{thanks}. We are always happy to
receive e-mails of this type.

Regrettably we don't have time to answer them all in person. If you
mail us a compliment and don't receive a reply, \e{please} don't
think we've ignored you. We did receive it and we were happy about
it; we just didn't have time to tell you so personally.

To everyone who's ever sent us praise and compliments, in the past
and the future: \e{you're welcome}!

\H{feedback-address} E-mail address

The actual address to mail is
\cw{<\W{mailto:putty@projects.tartarus.org}{putty@projects.tartarus.org}>}.