User Guide

GNU Image Manipulation Program
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Appendix B
Reporting Bugs and Requesting Enhancements
Sad to say, no version of GIMP has yet been absolutely perfect. Even sadder, it is likely that no version ever will be. In spite of
all efforts to make everything work, a program as complicated as GIMP is bound to screw things up occasionally, or even crash.
But the fact that bugs are unavoidable does not mean that they should be passively accepted. If you find a bug in GIMP, the
developers would like to know about it so they can at least try to fix it.
Suppose, then, that you have found a bug, or at least think you have: you try to do something, and the results are not what you
expect. What should you do? How should you report it?
Tip
The procedure for making an enhancement request–that is, for asking the developers to add a missing feature–is
nearly the same as the procedure for reporting a bug. The only thing you do differently is to mark the report as an
‘enhancement’ at the appropriate stage, as described below.
In common with many other free software projects, GIMP uses a bug-reporting mechanism called Bugzilla. This is a very
powerful web-based system, capable of managing thousands of bug reports without losing track. In fact, GIMP shares its Bugzilla
database with the entire Gnome project. At the time this is being written, Gnome Bugzilla contains 148632 bug reports–no, make
that 148633.
B.1 Making sure it’s a Bug
The first thing you should do, before reporting a bug, is to make an effort to verify that what you are seeing really is a bug.
It is hard to give a method for doing this that applies to all situations, but reading the documentation will often be useful, and
discussing the question on IRC or a mailing list may also be quite helpful. If you are seeing a crash, as opposed to mere
misbehavior, the odds that it is a true bug are pretty high: well written software programs are not designed to crash under any
circumstances. In any case, if you have made an conscientious effort to decide whether it is really a bug, and at the end still aren’t
sure, then please go ahead and report it: the worst that can happen is that you will waste a bit of time for the development team.
Note
Actually there are a few things that are known to cause GIMP to crash but have turned out to be too inconvenient to be
worth fixing. One of them is asking GIMP to do something that requires vast amounts of memory, such as creating an
image one million pixels on a side.
You should also make sure that you are using an up-to-date version of GIMP: reporting bugs that have already been fixed is just a
waste of everybody’s time. (GIMP 1 is no longer maintained, so if you use it and find bugs, either upgrade to GIMP 2 or live with