Write Quality Bug Reports
The quality of the MySQL Server, Connectors, and GUI Tools is profoundly affected by the quantity and quality of the bug reports provided to us by community members via our public Bug Database. Particularly critical are bugs identified early in the alpha and beta stages of various server and tool releases. The information provided within a bug report, in particular, the instructions on how to consistently reproduce the bug in question, allows engineers to save hours of development time tracking down the source of a bug's behaviour. For more background information on how bugs are processed after they have been reported, see Giuseppe's excellent article "MySQL bugs processing explained" on the MySQL Developer Zone.
Here are a list of things to keep in mind when submitting bug reports:
- Always check the advanced search page to ensure that a similar bug has not already been reported. This is important for a couple reasons. First, and most obviously, is to reduce wasted or duplicated effort on managing multiple bug reports for the same bug. Second, it is important to "lend your vote" to an existing bug (perhaps even on a different platform but exhibiting the same behaviour) so that bug fixers are aware of the various platforms affected by the bug.
- Made sure you are using the latest production version if similar bugs have recently been fixed and committed.
- Read our tips on how to report a bug.
- Provide as much detail as possible. Fill out all fields possible in the bug report, with attention paid to how to reproduce the bug. If possible, include a description of what the expected results of a particular action should be, as well as what the actual results are
- Provide contact information for yourself so that, if necessary, bug fixers can get in touch with you for more information
- Provide detailed information about the operating system, MySQL server or tool version, and in some cases, the hardware/platform upon which the bug was found.