Contacting the developers / Reporting Bugs

We encourage users to take extra time to write high-quality bug reports when submitting them. This reduces wasted effort on all sides, as the reporter and the developer who will fix it trade emails until this information is really in place.

Eli Goldberg wrote the canonical Bug-Writing Guideline, available at http://issues.apache.org/bugwritinghelp.html. Generally, you'll be well-served by following these guidelines:

Include your system information.  The Help->Report Bug menu choice will fill this in automatically, but if you would prefer not to use this interface, we will need to know the version of KMyMoney you're running, the version of KDE, the name and version of your distribution, and the version of your kernel.

Include a backtrace for crashes.  The backtrace is often the single most useful piece of information in solving crashes.

Try to reproduce it.  Let us know if you were able to do so. It's useful to know whether the bug only happened once and you couldn't get it to happen again or happens every time or happens sometimes but not others.

Include specific steps.  This is a bad bug report: “I entered a transaction, and KMyMoney crashed.” A much better bug report is: “Using the transaction form, I entered a new transaction in my Credit Card account. I selected the Transfer tab, entered in an amount, then changed to the Deposit tab, and back to the Transfer tab. When I returned to the Transfer tab, KMyMoney crashed. This bug is fully reproducible for me.”

Tell us what you expected to happen.  In some cases, this is obvious, but in more subtle bugs, sometimes you'll see a bug report where it is not obvious what the reporter expected to happen. Always tell us what you think should have happened.

Consider running with debugging enabled.  By compiling a version configured with --enable-debug=full you can ensure that the best possible backtraces are generated. If you encounter a crash, run KMyMoney again from within gdb, and reproduce the crash. When it crashes, type “bt” to generate a backtrace.

Running this way is a bit more difficult, so we don't expect all users to do this. However, if you're interested in helping KMyMoney become as stable as possible, this is the best way to do it short of finding the bug in the code and sending in a patch.