# Bug Buddy Manual

Copyright © 2001 by Jacob Berkman

Copyright © 2001 by Telsa Gwynne

# Introduction

`Bug Buddy` is a tool which will guide you through making a bug report as painlessly as possible. You can alter things at any stage, and then either send, save, or abandon the resulting report. This document describes version 1.90 of `Bug Buddy`: note that it has changed substantially in appearance from earlier versions.

| Big Bug Buddy Changes
| `Bug Buddy` has undergone major changes recently. The Gnome bugtracking system is moving from the email-based debbugs installation which it originally used to the web-based bugzilla installation. This is to help deal with bugs more efficiently. This means `Bug Buddy` has been substantially rewritten to deal with the bugzilla system. It looks very similar in appearance and structure, but be aware that it now talks to bugzillas. Reports will only go to the old debbugs system for GNOME if bugzilla doesn't have a category for the bug. This also means that `Bug Buddy` has currently lost the ability to send bugs to the KDE and Debian bug-trackers directly. Note that you can still save reports for those into a file and then mail the file to those trackers yourself.

`Bug Buddy` can be started in a variety of ways:

- Open the main GNOME menu and select Programs->Utilities->Bug Report Tool .

- Run bug-buddy at the prompt in a terminal such as `gnome-terminal` or `xterm`.

- If you are using the `GNOME file manager`, gmc, you can double-click your mouse on a core file to start it.

- When a GNOME program experiences a bad crash, a `crash dialogue box` is displayed. If `Bug Buddy` is present on the system, then one of the options in the dialogue box will be to make a bug-report. Selecting that will lead you to a further dialogue box giving you details of the program which crashed. Continuing at this stage will invoke `Bug Buddy` .

`Bug Buddy` is a very structured program. At any stage you can continue forward or head backwards to correct earlier details, or you can click the Help button to bring up this document.

The aim of all this is to be able to collect all the information which a developer will need to reproduce the same problem and be able to fix it. Some of the information generated may look a bit off-putting, but don't delete it. It will be useful.

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