A. Reporting Bugs

If any bugs are discovered in Emacs/W3, please report them to the mailing list w3-beta@xemacs.org -- this is where the brave souls who beta test the latest versions of Emacs/W3 reside, and are generally very responsive to bug reports. Please make sure to use the bug submission feature of Emacs/W3, so that all relevant information will be sent along with your bug report. By default this is bound to the `w' key when in an Emacs/W3 buffer, or you can use M-x w3-submit-bug from anywhere within Emacs.

For problems that are causing emacs to signal and error, please send a backtrace. You can get a backtrace by M-x setvariable RET debug-on-error RET t RET, and then reproduce the error.

If the problem is visual, please capture a copy of the output and mail it along with the bug report (preferably as a MIME attachment, but anything will do). You can use the xwd program under X-windows for this, or Alt-PrintScreen under Windows 95/NT. Sorry, but I don't remember what the magic incarnation is for doing a screen dump under NeXTstep or OS/2.

If the problem is actually causing Emacs to crash, then you will need to also mail the maintainers of the various Emacs distributions with the bug. Please use the gnu.emacs.bug newgroup for reporting bugs with GNU Emacs 19, and comp.emacs.xemacs for reporting bugs with XEmacs 19 or XEmacs 20. I am actively involved with the beta testing of the latest versions of both branches of Emacs, and if I can reproduce the problem, I will do my best to see it gets fixed in the next release.

It is also important to always maintain as much context as possible in your responses. I get so much email from my various Emacs-activities and work, that I cannot remember everything. If you send a bug report, and I send you a reply, and you reply with 'no that didn't work', then odds are I will have no clue what didn't work, much less what that was trying to fix in the first place. It will be much quicker and less painful if I don't have to waste a round-trip email exchange saying 'what are you talking about'.

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