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[u/mdw/putty] / doc / feedback.but

\versionid $Id: feedback.but,v 1.20 2004/11/15 15:57:28 jacob 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 to a
newsgroup (see \k{feedback-other-fora}), or some other means, then it
would make our lives much easier.

We get so much e-mail that we literally do not have time to answer
it all. We regret this, but there's nothing we can do about it. So
if you can \e{possibly} avoid sending mail to the PuTTY team, we
recommend you do so. In particular, support requests
(\k{feedback-support}) are probably better sent to newsgroups, or
passed to a local expert if possible.

The PuTTY contact email address is a private mailing list containing
four or five core developers. Don't be put off by it being a mailing
list: if you need to send confidential data as part of a bug report,
you can trust the people on the list to respect that confidence.
Also, the archives aren't publicly available, so you shouldn't be
letting yourself in for any spam by sending us mail.

Please use a meaningful subject line on your message.  We get a lot of
mail, and it's hard to find the message we're looking for if they all
have subject lines like \q{PuTTY bug}.

\S{feedback-largefiles} Sending large attachments

Since the PuTTY contact address is a mailing list, 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.

If you are considering sending any kind of large data file to the
PuTTY team, it's almost always a bad idea, or at the very least it
would be better to ask us first whether we actually need the file.
Alternatively, you could put the file on a web site and just send us
the URL; that way, we don't have to download it unless we decide we
actually need it, and only one of us needs to download it instead of
it being automatically copied to all the developers.

Some people like to send mail in MS Word format. Please \e{don't}
send us bug reports, or any other mail, 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 file 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!

Some people like to send us screen shots when demonstrating a
problem. Please don't do this without checking with us first - we
almost never actually need the information in the screen shot.
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. (On some versions of Windows, pressing Ctrl-C when the error
box is displayed will copy the text of the message to the clipboard.)
Sending a full-screen shot is \e{occasionally} useful, but it's
probably still wise to check whether we need it before sending it.

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.

Please don't mail us executables, at all. Our mail server blocks all
incoming e-mail containing executables, as a defence against the
vast numbers of e-mail viruses we receive every day. If you mail us
an executable, it will just bounce.

If you have made a tiny modification to the PuTTY code, please send
us a \e{patch} to the source code if possible, rather than sending
us a huge \cw{.ZIP} file containing the complete sources plus your
modification. If you've only changed 10 lines, we'd prefer to
receive a mail that's 30 lines long than one containing multiple
megabytes of data we already have.

\S{feedback-other-fora} Other places to ask for help

There are two Usenet newsgroups that are particularly relevant to the
PuTTY tools:

\b \W{news:comp.security.ssh}\c{comp.security.ssh}, for questions
specific to using the SSH protocol;

\b \W{news:comp.terminals}\c{comp.terminals}, for issues relating to
terminal emulation (for instance, keyboard problems).

If you don't have direct access to Usenet, you can access these
newsgroups through Google Groups
(\W{http://groups.google.com/}\cw{groups.google.com}).

\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/}{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 PuTTY is a multi-platform application; tell us what version of what
OS you are running PuTTY on. (If you're running on Unix, or Windows
for Alpha, tell us, or we'll assume you're running on Windows for
Intel as this is overwhelmingly the case.)

\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.

It is reasonable to report bugs in PuTTY's documentation, if you
think the documentation is unclear or unhelpful. But we do need to
be given exact details of \e{what} you think the documentation has
failed to tell you, or \e{how} you think it could be made clearer.
If your problem is simply that you don't \e{understand} the
documentation, we suggest posting to a newsgroup (see
\k{feedback-other-fora}) and seeing if someone
will explain what you need to know. \e{Then}, if you think the
documentation could usefully have told you that, send us a bug
report and explain how you think we should change it.

\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/}{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 Wishlist and
\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. Offering a new and compelling
justification might help. 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-support} Support requests

If you're trying to make PuTTY do something for you and it isn't
working, but you're not sure whether it's a bug or not, then
\e{please} consider looking for help somewhere else. This is one of
the most common types of mail the PuTTY team receives, and we simply
don't have time to answer all the questions. Questions of this type
include:

\b If you want to do something with PuTTY but have no idea where to
start, and reading the manual hasn't helped, try posting to a
newsgroup (see \k{feedback-other-fora}) and see if someone can explain
it to you.

\b If you have tried to do something with PuTTY but it hasn't
worked, and you aren't sure whether it's a bug in PuTTY or a bug in
your SSH server or simply that you're not doing it right, then try
posting to a newsgroup (see \k{feedback-other-fora}) and see
if someone can solve your problem. Or try doing the same thing with
a different SSH client and see if it works with that. Please do not
report it as a PuTTY bug unless you are really sure it \e{is} a bug
in PuTTY.

\b If someone else installed PuTTY for you, or you're using PuTTY on
someone else's computer, try asking them for help first.  They're more
likely to understand how they installed it and what they expected you
to use it for than we are.

\b If you have successfully made a connection to your server and now
need to know what to type at the server's command prompt, or other
details of how to use the server-end software, talk to your server's
system administrator. This is not the PuTTY team's problem. PuTTY is
only a communications tool, like a telephone; if you can't speak the
same language as the person at the other end of the phone, it isn't
the telephone company's job to teach it to you.

If you absolutely cannot get a support question answered any other
way, you can try mailing it to us, but we can't guarantee to have
time to answer it.

\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.

If you want to report a problem with our web site, check that you're
looking at our \e{real} web site and not a mirror. The real web site
is at
\W{http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/}\c{http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/};
if that's not where you're reading this, then don't report the
problem to us until you've checked that it's really a problem with
the main site. If it's only a problem with the mirror, you should
try to contact the administrator of that mirror site first, and only
contact us if that doesn't solve the problem (in case we need to
remove the mirror from our list).

\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 distribute PuTTY alongside your own application for
use with that application, or if you want to distribute PuTTY within
your own organisation, then we recommend you offer your own
first-line technical support, to answer questions about the
interaction of PuTTY with your environment. If your users mail us
directly, we won't be able to tell them anything useful about your
specific setup.)

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

Mirrors of the PuTTY web site are welcome, especially in regions not
well covered by existing mirrors. 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 checked that
it works, 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 (see also the
\W{http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/mirrors.html#guidelines}{guidelines on the Mirrors page});
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}>}.