Bug reporting

A quick guide to producing meaningful bug reports for ABCL

This guide describes how to report bugs in ABCL. When you think you've found a bug, send a bug report to the mailing list. For the bug report to be most useful, try and do the following things:
  1. Use a descriptive subject, stating a brief summary of the bug, and mentioning that you're reporting a bug. Don't be fussy about the format of the subject, we don't process the bugs automatically, just try to provide a meaningful description.
  2. Add a short program snippet that demonstrates what ABCL does incorrectly, and if necessary, quote any relevant portions in the Common Lisp standard.
  3. Differences between ABCL and other Common Lisp implementations are useful information, if you find that some other Common Lisp implementation works correctly and ABCL has a bug, it helps us in fixing the problem, so try your program snippet on other implementations as well and post the results.
  4. Try and answer any questions asked about your bug report.
  5. It is very much appreciated if you can actually find what's causing the bug in ABCL codebase and even better still if you can produce a patch that fixes the problem. Don't fret if you can't, though, reports without patches are warmly welcomed, but we highly appreciate patch contibutions.
After all that, sit back, relax and enjoy yourself, the bug should get fixed eventually. The maintainers of ABCL are usually rather busy, but we will take a look at all bug reports when we have time.