Contents

• Introduction
• Original Guidelines
• References

Introduction

This PEP contained guidelines for handling bug reports in the Python bug tracker. It has been replaced by the Developer’s Guide description of issue triaging at

https://docs.python.org/devguide/triaging.html

Guidelines for people submitting Python bugs are at

http://docs.python.org/bugs.html

Original Guidelines

1. Make sure the bug category and bug group are correct. If they are correct, it is easier for someone interested in helping to find out, say, what all the open Tkinter bugs are.
2. If it’s a minor feature request that you don’t plan to address right away, add it to PEP 42 or ask the owner to add it for you. If you add the bug to PEP 42, mark the bug as “feature request”, “later”, and “closed”; and add a comment to the bug saying that this is the case (mentioning the PEP explicitly).

   XXX do we prefer the tracker or PEP 42?
   

3. Assign the bug a reasonable priority. We don’t yet have a clear sense of what each priority should mean. One rule, however, is that bugs with priority “urgent” or higher must be fixed before the next release.
4. If a bug report doesn’t have enough information to allow you to reproduce or diagnose it, ask the original submitter for more information. If the original report is really thin and your email doesn’t get a response after a reasonable waiting period, you can close the bug.
5. If you fix a bug, mark the status as “Fixed” and close it. In the comments, include the SVN revision numbers of the commit(s). In the SVN checkin message, include the issue number and a normal description of the change, mentioning the contributor if a patch was applied.
6. If you are assigned a bug that you are unable to deal with, assign it to someone else if you think they will be able to deal with it, otherwise it’s probably best to unassign it.

References

1

http://bugs.python.org/