Bug Tracker

Using the Mercurial bug tracker.

1. Finding the right bug tracker

Please first check if your issue is caused by a GUI tool or third-party extension. Other bug trackers include:

2. Getting started

Mercurial's bug tracking system is located at https://bz.mercurial-scm.org/. It's used for tracking known bugs, requested features, and wishlist items.

Most bug tracker usage will need you to register an account so that you can get updates on your bug reports.

3. Don't send patches

We don't accept patches on the BTS:

Since we'll never run out of patches submitted the right way that are much easier for us to deal with, your patch will go unloved. See ContributingChanges for how to send a patch we'll love.

4. Creating a new issue

<!> Before filing a new bug, please use the search form to try to locate similar bugs.

When creating a new issue, put a specific summary of your issue in the title.

4.1. Choosing a priority

Please try to select the most appropriate severity:

Once the bug is filed, there will be a priority associated with it:

{i} A regression is defined as a bug that breaks something that used to work in earlier releases.

{i} Critical bugs may trigger out-of-cycle releases.

4.2. Helpful Information to include in your description

5. The life cycle of a bug

As a bug is tracked, it will go through various states, some of which will demand your attention:

Issues in the NEED_EXAMPLE and TESTING states will be marked RESOLVED if there is no further activity. If a bug stays "stuck" in some unresolved state for a long time, it may eventually be resolved as WONTFIX or ARCHIVED.

Resolutions - how a bug is closed out:

6. Etiquette

7. Why we auto-close old issues

You may have noticed your issue got moved to RESOLVED ARCHIVED automatically after several months of inactivity.

We have finite resources so not all issues will get attention. If we leave issues we don't prioritize open indefinitely, we'll have backlog that grows without limit, primarily populated by low-priority issues of unknown relevance to current Mercurial.

Experience has shown that no one is regularly motivated to dig through a huge, low-quality backlog because there's always new stuff to work on. This means as soon as an issue stops being active, it can disappear entirely from developers' radar, even if it's important. This is no good, so we have to do something to keep the backlog from growing indefinitely.

We could aggressively close bugs we don't want to work on. But this has two problems: we often intend to work on things, and we don't want to spend our time arguing about which bugs are important. The alternative is to automatically close bugs that no one seems to be interested in. The aim here is to get a shorter, higher-quality backlog that developers actually pay attention to and thus improve our overall responsiveness to bug reports.

That said, if you feel your issue is still relevant, please feel free to test against current Mercurial and re-open it.

8. Shirt

People reporting regressions during release candidate phase will be sent a shirt (as stock permit). Here are the current available colors:

9. See also


CategoryBugs CategoryProject

BugTracker (last edited 2021-06-05 08:32:26 by PeterSuter)