Hi all,
I wanted to share a quick reminder about what we look for in filing tickets in GitHub.
Bugs should be reported on github - http://github.com/ansible/ansible, not the mailing list. The mailing list is not a bug forum, but a place to share what people are doing with ansible as well as to ask questions. There are cases where help threads to the mailing list result in a request to post something to github – but if you know you have a bug, just go straight to github.
Name tickets descriptively: Always name bug tickets well enough so someone reading the ticket can understand what the bug is about without reading the ticket. “Foo module traceback when bar=xyz” is great. “Foo module is broken” is bad because it doesn’t say how it is broken. “traceback when bar=xyz” is bad too, as we don’t know what part of the code it is about. “Foo doesn’t work” is generally bad all over, as we don’t even know what “working” would mean most of the time.
State what you expect: state what you would expect to happen and what actually happens
Show your versions: Always include the entire output of “ansible --version”. Don’t just say “devel” if you are running devel, include the output every time. About 9/10 of tickets do not include the Ansible version they are being tested against.
Be succinct: Where possible communicate the problem as succintly as possible. Avoid asking a lot of intermediate questions where we have to determine what is the key question in the ticket. you are sharing a way to reproduce something, boil it down to a minimal example. If you can show something that uses one variable and the template module, that’s better than an example that requires a HA setup of a whole database on Solaris and 40 different YAML files
Share Input and Output: Where possible include a playbook or snippet to reproduce the problem in the ticket text – or if spanning many different files, you may host a repo, or put something up on gist.github.com so we can easily paste it and reproduce something. Avoid posting content pastebins and linking to them on the ticket system, because content can expire – and the content posted is not readable when searching through the bug tracker.