## 5. Bug Reporting Guidelines

When you find a bug in Postgres Pro we want to hear about it. Your bug reports play an important part in making Postgres Pro more reliable because even the utmost care cannot guarantee that every part of Postgres Pro will work on every platform under every circumstance.

The following suggestions are intended to assist you in forming bug reports that can be handled in an effective fashion. No one is required to follow them but doing so tends to be to everyone's advantage.

### 5.1. Identifying Bugs

Before you report a bug, please read and re-read the documentation to verify that you can really do whatever it is you are trying. If it is not clear from the documentation whether you can do something or not, please report that too; it is a bug in the documentation. If it turns out that a program does something different from what the documentation says, that is a bug. That might include, but is not limited to, the following circumstances:

- A program terminates with a fatal signal or an operating system error message that would point to a problem in the program. (A counterexample might be a “disk full” message, since you have to fix that yourself.)

- A program produces the wrong output for any given input.

- A program refuses to accept valid input (as defined in the documentation).

- A program accepts invalid input without a notice or error message. But keep in mind that your idea of invalid input might be our idea of an extension or compatibility with traditional practice.

- Postgres Pro fails to install according to the instructions on supported platforms.

Here “program” refers to any executable, not only the backend process.

Being slow or resource-hogging is not necessarily a bug. Failing to comply to the SQL standard is not necessarily a bug either, unless compliance for the specific feature is explicitly claimed.

### 5.2. What to Report

When reporting a bug, make sure to state all the facts. Each bug report should contain the following items:

- The exact sequence of steps from program start-up necessary to reproduce the problem. This should be self-contained; it is not enough to send in a bare `SELECT` statement without the preceding `CREATE TABLE` and `INSERT` statements, if the output should depend on the data in the tables.

  The best format for a test case for SQL-related problems is a file that can be run through the psql frontend that shows the problem. (Be sure to not have anything in your `~/.psqlrc` start-up file.) An easy way to create this file is to use pg_dump to dump out the table declarations and data needed to set the scene, then add the problem query. You are encouraged to minimize the size of your example, but this is not absolutely necessary. If the bug is reproducible, we will find it either way.

  If your application uses some other client interface, such as PHP, then please try to isolate the offending queries.

- The output you got. If there is an error message, show it. If the program terminates with an operating system error, say which. If nothing at all happens, say so. Even if the result of your test case is a program crash or otherwise obvious it might not happen on our platform. The easiest thing is to copy the output from the terminal, if possible.

  ### Note

  If you are reporting an error message, please obtain the most verbose form of the message. In psql, say `\set VERBOSITY verbose` beforehand. If you are extracting the message from the server log, set the run-time parameter log_error_verbosity to `verbose` so that all details are logged.

  ### Note

  In case of fatal errors, the error message reported by the client might not contain all the information available. Please also look at the log output of the database server.

- The output you expect is very important to state. Please provide the expected output, if applicable.

- Any command line options and other start-up options, including any relevant environment variables or configuration files that you changed from the default.

- Anything you did at all differently from the installation instructions.

- The Postgres Pro version. You can run the command `SELECT pgpro_version();` to find out the version of the server you are connected to. Most executable programs also support a `--version` option; at least `postgres --version` and `psql --version` should work.

- Platform information. This includes the kernel name and version, C library, processor, memory information, and so on.

### 5.3. Where to Report Bugs

In general, send bug reports to our support email address at `<bugs@postgrespro.ru>`. You are requested to use a descriptive subject for your email message, perhaps parts of the error message.

Do not send bug reports specific to Postgres Pro to the PostgreSQL support email address, as Postgres Pro is not supported by the PostgreSQL community. But you can send reports to `<pgsql-bugs@lists.postgresql.org>` for any bugs related to PostgreSQL.

Even if your bug is not specific to Postgres Pro, do not send bug reports to any of the user mailing lists, such as `<pgsql-sql@lists.postgresql.org>` or `<pgsql-general@lists.postgresql.org>`. These mailing lists are for answering user questions, and their subscribers normally do not wish to receive bug reports. More importantly, they are unlikely to fix them.

Also, please do not send reports to the developers' mailing list `<pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>`. This list is for discussing the development of PostgreSQL, and it would be nice if the community could keep the bug reports separate. The community might choose to take up a discussion about your bug report on `pgsql-hackers`, if the PostgreSQL-related problem needs more review.