How to report a bug in Mu
If you’ve ever written a line of code, you’ll know that all software has bugs. This will be the case with Mu.
If you think you have found a bug, simply click on the button below (you’ll need to have an account on GitHub) and then click the green “New Issue” button found at the top right hand side of the page:
When you create a new issue it will be given a number and the volunteer developers, who write and maintain the code, will be informed by email. They may annotate questions to your issue, if things are not clear. They may immediately close it and mark it as “duplicate” (someone else has already reported the bug – and they’ll reference the original issue). Sometimes they’ll close the bug and say “won’t fix”, because they disagree that it’s a bug or it’s too trivial in order to invest any time. Finally, please be aware of the famous PEBCAK bug (Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard). This simply indicates the user has caused the problem (rather than the software): a misconfigured computer, a misunderstanding, or perhaps a mismatch of expectation. ;-)
There are generally two sorts of bugs:
- Technical: the code has a mistake in it which causes the program to break.
- Behavioural: the code works correctly, but is doing the wrong thing.
In both cases, for us to be able to fix the bug, we need as much information as possible. When you create a new issue you should try to include, where relevant, the following sorts of information:
- What you were trying to do,
- What steps you took to make this happen,
- What you expected to happen,
- What actually happened,
- Why this difference is problematic (it may not be a bug!),
- Technical details like the version of Mu you’re using, your OS version and other aspects of the context in which Mu was running.
Please remember to attach a copy of the full log files for Mu.
Use plain and simple language to describe the problem and, if helpful, break it down into steps so developers can easily recreate the issue. Please don’t assume we’ll understand what you were trying to achieve – honestly, it’s best if you try to imagine we (the developers) are a bunch of clever 5-year-olds. Try to explain everything about the problem and don’t assume we know what you mean. We won’t mind! ;-)
If you would like to get more involved in the development of Mu, we’d love to welcome you via the Mu developer’s website.
