Reporting a LaTeX bug
The LaTeX team supports LaTeX, and will deal with
bona fide bug reports. Note that the LaTeX team does
not deal with contributed packages — just the software that
is part of the LaTeX distribution itself: LaTeX and the
“required” packages.
Furthermore, you need to be slightly
careful to produce a bug report that is usable by the team. The steps
are:
1. Are you still using current LaTeX? Maintenance is only
available for sufficiently up-to-date versions of LaTeX — if your
LaTeX is more than two versions out of date, the bug reporting
mechanisms may reject your report.
2. Has your bug already been reported? Browse the
LaTeX bugs database,
to find any earlier instance of your bug. In many cases, the database
will list a work-around.
3. Prepare a
“minimum” file that exhibits the problem.
Ideally, such a file should contain no contributed packages — the
LaTeX team as a whole takes no responsibility for such packages (if
they’re supported at all, they’re supported by their authors). The
“minimum” file should be self-sufficient: if a member of the team
should run it in a clean directory, on a system with no contributed
packages, it should replicate your problem.
4. Run your file through LaTeX: the bug
system needs the .log
file that this process creates.
You now have two possible ways to proceed: either create a mail report
to send to the bug processing mechanism (5, below), or submit your bug
report via the web (7, below).
5. Process the bug-report creation file, using LaTeX itself:
latex latexbug
latexbug asks you some questions, and then lets you describe
the bug you’ve found. It produces an output file latexbug.msg,
which includes the details you’ve supplied, your “minimum” example
file, and the log file you got after running the example. (I always
need to edit the result before submitting it: typing text into
latexbug isn’t much fun.)
6. Mail the resulting file to
latex-bugs@latex-project.org; the subject line of your email
should be the same as the bug title you gave to latexbug. The
file latexbug.msg should be included into your message in-line:
attachments are likely to be rejected by the bug processor.
7. Connect to the
latex bugs processing web page
and enter details of your bug — category, summary and full
description, and the two important files (source and log file); note
that members of the LaTeX team need your name and email address, as
they may need to discuss the bug with you, or to advise you of a
work-around.