Dealing with bugs in CVS or this manual

Neither CVS nor this manual is perfect, and they probably never will be. If you are having trouble using CVS, or think you have found a bug, there are a number of things you can do about it. Note that if the manual is unclear, that can be considered a bug in the manual, so these problems are often worth doing something about as well as problems with CVS itself.

• If you want someone to help you and fix bugs that you report, there are companies which will do that for a fee. Two such companies are:

  Signum Support AB
  Box 2044
  S-580 02  Linkoping
  Sweden
  Email: info@signum.se
  Phone: +46 (0)13 - 21 46 00
  Fax:   +46 (0)13 - 21 47 00
  http://www.signum.se/
  
  Cyclic Software
  United States of America
  http://www.cyclic.com/
  info@cyclic.com
  

• If you got CVS through a distributor, such as an operating system vendor or a vendor of freeware CD-ROMs, you may wish to see whether the distributor provides support. Often, they will provide no support or minimal support, but this may vary from distributor to distributor.
• If you have the skills and time to do so, you may wish to fix the bug yourself. If you wish to submit your fix for inclusion in future releases of CVS, see the file HACKING in the CVS source distribution. It contains much more information on the process of submitting fixes.
• There may be resources on the net which can help. Two good places to start are:

  http://www.cyclic.com
  http://www.loria.fr/~molli/cvs-index.html
  

  If you are so inspired, increasing the information available on the net is likely to be appreciated. For example, before the standard CVS distribution worked on Windows 95, there was a web page with some explanation and patches for running CVS on Windows 95, and various people helped out by mentioning this page on mailing lists or newsgroups when the subject came up.
• It is also possible to report bugs to bug-cvs. Note that someone may or may not want to do anything with your bug report--if you need a solution consider one of the options mentioned above. People probably do want to hear about bugs which are particularly severe in consequences and/or easy to fix, however. You can also increase your odds by being as clear as possible about the exact nature of the bug and any other relevant information. The way to report bugs is to send email to bug-cvs@gnu.org. Note that submissions to bug-cvs may be distributed under the terms of the GNU Public License, so if you don't like this, don't submit them. There is usually no justification for sending mail directly to one of the CVS maintainers rather than to bug-cvs; those maintainers who want to hear about such bug reports read bug-cvs. Also note that sending a bug report to other mailing lists or newsgroups is not a substitute for sending it to bug-cvs. It is fine to discuss CVS bugs on whatever forum you prefer, but there are not necessarily any maintainers reading bug reports sent anywhere except bug-cvs.

People often ask if there is a list of known bugs or whether a particular bug is a known one. The file BUGS in the CVS source distribution is one list of known bugs, but it doesn't necessarily try to be comprehensive. Perhaps there will never be a comprehensive, detailed list of known bugs.

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