Reporting bugs or wishes

Thank you for taking the time to report things that are broken, missing, or should be improved, in RKWard. Before you do, a few basic guides to make sure we can handle your input, efficiently. We’ll make it short:

Browsing and commenting on existing bugs and wishes

Especially after new releases of RKWard and/or R we occasionally get reports of similar problems repeatedly. Please take a minute to check, whether the issue you are about to report has already been reported (and probably fixed, too). You can browse existing open bugs and wishes in the KDE bugtracking system.

Reporting bugs

Please make sure you provide us with as much helpful information as you can. Even seemingly “obvious” issues will sometimes depend on very specific circumstances that we need to understand to be able to address the problem at all. We often have to spend a considerable amount of time asking for basic information, and so you can save us (and yourself) a lot of work by providing the most important information upfront.

• Whenever possible, use the template provided by Help-\>Report Bug from within RKWard. This will automatically include a lot of useful information, that is often key to analysing issues.
• If this is not possible, for some reason (e.g. RKWard is not starting at all), make sure to include information on the following items:
  • the version number of RKWard
  • the version number of R
  • the version number of KDE frameworks (libraries)
  • the operating system
  • the method of installation used (for KDE, R and RKWard; e.g. binary bundle, distributor’s packages or compiled from source)
  • Much of the above is also provided by running rk.sessionInfo() in the R Console window.
• Make sure to answer the following questions very diligently:
  • what did you do to run into the problem? (if it’s running some R code, please consider including example code to reproduce it)
  • how can the problem be reproduced? Please try to be as specific as possible. Sometimes a bug will depend on a minor detail of your workflow, so we need to be able follow your exact steps.

Submit this info as a new bug report in the KDE Bugtracking System. Note that you will have to create an account, if you don’t have one, yet.

Only if this is not possible for some reason, you can also send your report to our mailing list.

Reporting wishes

• Please report one wish at a time. Split several issues into several tickets. This makes it much easier to manage.
• Try to make a specific suggestion, not just “Feature XY should be improved”. If you cannot quite put your finger on what should be done, do let us know, too, but write to our mailing list, instead of opening a ticket. This is better suited for discussions.
• While in many cases this information may not be strictly necessary, it is never wrong, and often helpful, to include the output of rk.sessionInfo() in your request.

Subject to the above, submit this info as a new wishlist item in the KDE Bugtracking system. Note that you will have to create an account, if you don’t have one, yet.

Only if this is not possible for some reason, you can also send your report to our mailing list.