Bugzilla

Bugzilla is a widely used bug tracking/reporting system. Apertium has a bugzilla installation here. Please feel to report your bug in any language you are comfortable with.

Reporting a bug in the engine

If you find a bug in the engine, for example a segfault, or a malprocessing of text, please try and make the bug report as specific as possible. So if it happens in a phrase or a sentence, try and reduce the phrase until you find the exact part that is causing the error. This is not always possible, but in general, the less input text the better.

For example, if there is an error when you try and translate the phrase:

"The big black cat sat on the small brown rat"

First try "The big black cat", if that works, try "The big black cat sat", etc. Just chop and change the phrase or sentence until you manage to find the smallest possible amount of text that causes the bug. This will help the developers to hone in on the problem area more rapidly.

Please try and include the following information:

• The versions of both apertium and lttoolbox,
• If you compiled from source, or are using a package
• If you compiled from source, include the version of the compiler (gcc --version), and of the C++ library (ls /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.*)
• The versions of libxml2-dev and libpcre3-dev (ls /usr/lib/libpcre* /usr/lib/libxml*)
• Any more information you think relevant.

Furthermore, please try and identify the module in which the error is happening. If you aren't sure how to do this, please come on irc and someone will assist you.

Reporting a bug with a language pair

Mostly bugzilla is used for software which can ostensibly, at any moment, not have any bugs. Machine translation is different, our language pairs will always have bugs, often quite gaping ones. So, in order to not be inundated, take heed of the following (incomplete) advice:

Do not

• Do not report bugs which you can easily fix. For example, if the translation of "house boat" is wrong, instead of reporting a bug saying "Translation of 'house boat' wrong in apertium-en-ca", either fix it yourself, or email the fix to the language pair maintainer to fix.
• Do not report feature requests. These should be saved for the TODO list. Do not report bugs on items which are in the TODO list. For example, if "Fix personal pronouns" is in the TODO list, do not report bugs about personal pronouns.

Do

• Do report bugs which effect the whole pair. For example, if we can analyse, but not generate ijekavian forms of words in Serbo-Croatian, and we should be able to generate these forms.
• Do report bugs which are marked as fixed in a TODO file. For example if attributive/predicative adjective forms are not working in Afrikaans and they are marked as fixed, submit a bug!
• Read the bug reporting guidelines.

Submitting a patch

If you have a patch that fixes a bug in SVN, please feel free to attach it to the bug report and one of the developers will look over it as soon as possible. To create a patch use:

$ svn diff -r HEAD

Or something to this effect.