# Subversion Issue Tracker

## Issue Tracker Guidelines

As Subversion continues to mature, and as it gains attention from new users, folks will inevitably find bugs in, or come up with enhancements that they would like to see made to, the software. The Subversion community welcomes such requests for enhancements and reports of bugs. However, we ask that you follow a few guidelines with respect to the issue filing process.

Before filing an issue in the Issue Tracker, please:

- Look through the existing issues to determine if your concern has already been noted by someone else.
- Make sure that you've read the appropriate documentation (for example, the Subversion book) to verify that you are using the software appropriately, and to determine if any problems you are seeing are perhaps not real bugs.
- Send email to the users list (users@subversion.tigris.org) or development list (dev@subversion.tigris.org) fully describing the enhancement or bug that brought you here today. That will give the community a chance to ask questions of you, so that we can fully understand your concern.

When mailing the development list with a concern, make sure that your e-mail describes your bug or enhancement fully. Provide details about the versions of the relevant software (Subversion, Apache, neon, etc.) that you are using, about your operating system, and about any other thing that might seem pertinent to the issue. If you can provide a script which consistently reproduces a problem, that can be incredibly helpful to those evaluating and/or working on your issue.

After mailing the development list, you should expect your concern to be addressed with relative immediacy. That is, within a few days, you should get feedback on your mail. If indeed you have found a new bug in Subversion, or if your enhancement request is feasible, you will likely be asked to return here and file a new issue in the Issue Tracker.

When you file the issue, don't forget to include links to the relevant mailing list threads. Those are important context for anyone reading the issue, and their presence also confirms that the issue has already been discussed on the mailing list (otherwise, the issue may get accidentally closed because no one can tell that it is the product of a discussion).

## What the Fields Mean

When an issue is first filed, it automatically goes in the "---" target milestone, which indicates that the issue has not yet been processed. A developer will examine it and maybe talk to other developers, then estimate the bug's severity, the effort required to fix it, and schedule it in a numbered milestone, for example 1.1. (Or they may put it the unscheduled or nonblocking milestone, if they consider it tolerable for all currently planned releases.)

An issue filed in unscheduled might still get fixed soon, if some committer decides they want it done. Putting it in unscheduled merely means it hasn't been scheduled for any particular release yet. The nonblocking milestone, on the other hand, means that we do not anticipate ever scheduling the issue for a particular release. This also does not mean the issue will never be fixed; it merely means that we don't plan to block any release on it.

Severity is represented in the Priority field. Here is how priority numbers map to severity:

- P1: Prevents work from getting done, causes data loss, or BFI ("Bad First Impression" -- too embarrassing for a 1.0 release).
- P2: Workaround required to get stuff done.
- P3: Like P2, but rarely encountered in normal usage.
- P4: Developer concern only, API stability or cleanliness issue.
- P5: Nice to fix, but in a pinch we could live with it.

Effort Required is represented in the Status Whiteboard with an "e number", which is the average of the most optimistic and most pessimistic projections for number of engineer/days needed to fix the bug. The e number always comes first, so we can sort on the field, but we include the actual spread after it, so we know when we're dealing with a wide range. For example "e2.5 (2 / 3)" is not quite the same as "e2.5 (1 / 4)"!

## Enter the Issue Tracker

And so, with further ado, we give you (drumroll…) the Subversion Issue Tracker.