Submitting a bug report

Most of the traffic on the Castor Users mailing list is about people asking for help on various features of Castor (whether JDO or XML). Whilst there is nothing wrong about asking questions and looking for help if you are stuck, it seems that there is room to improve the structure of this 'conversation'.

If you have a look at some of these threads (e.g. at the searchable mailing list archive), it's quite easy to see that most of the time ...

1. An initial question is posted.

2. An initial reply is posted with some follow-up questions, e.g. request for code fragments, mapping files, etc.

3. One or more code fragments, mapping files, etc. are being posted.

4. etc.

This document will establish guidelines with regards to step 3) above.

This document provides step-by-step instructions on how to submit a problem report (when being asked to do so). It does so by walking you through a fictive problem and its resulting bug report, and providing instructions based upon this scenario.

Per definition, any problem report submitted (in other words, most likely attached to a bug report at http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/CASTOR) by the means of a patch has to include the following artefacts:

Note: Whilst we can and will not impose these guidelines in their strictest sense, I think that the use of technologies such as JUnit will simplify problem resolution and as a result lead to shorter turn-around times. Which is ultimately where you, the user, gains..

To facilitate creation of a fully featured patch as discussed above, we have provided you with an already existing bug template at 'src/bugs/jdo/template'.

Note:Please note that this directory is distributed only as part of the source archive(s).

This directory holds all artefacts mentioned above, as is structured as follows:

To create you own bug report, please copy 'template' to e.g. bug1820, assuming that 1820 is the number assigned to your BugZilla problem report). Subsequently, please amend the files provided to match your own requirements. After you have consolidated your changes, the original directory structure in src/bugs could look as follows:

Once you have successfully executed your JUnit test case, please add this test to the master test suite available in src/bugs/AllTests.java as follows. To add a test to this suite, please duplicate the line

suite.addTestSuite(template.TestTemplate.class);

and replace the term 'jdo.template.TestTemplate.class' with 'jdo.bug1820.TestCase'.

This will allow us to run all tests related to all open bugs in one go by executing just this test suite.

As explained in cvs.html, we ask you to submit your code changes in the form of a unified patch by attaching it to the relevant bug report.

To create a unified patch for submission, you can either use the command line SVN client (which you find instructions to download for at http://subversion.tigris.org/ or any IDE that offers support or SVN (such as Eclipse with Subclipse plugin)

In any case, please note that we are trying to standardize on the use of unified patches only, and that you should always update your code (against the SVN repository) before creating the patch. If you have never used SVN before, there will be ways to convince us to accept e.g. a Zip file includig your changes.

Whilst we cannot assume that every Castor (JDO) user is an expert in the use of JUnit, we do believe that they are quite easy to get acquainted with. As a starting point, please find below some references: