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Appendix B: Feedback and bug reporting

This is a guide to providing feedback to the PuTTY development team. It is provided as both a web page on the PuTTY site, and an appendix in the PuTTY manual.

Section B.1 gives some general guidelines for sending any kind of e-mail to the development team. Following sections give more specific guidelines for particular types of e-mail, such as bug reports and feature requests.

Section B.1: General guidelines

The PuTTY development team gets a lot of mail. If you can possibly solve your own problem by reading the manual, reading the FAQ, reading the web site, asking a fellow user, perhaps posting on the newsgroup comp.security.ssh, or some other means, then it would make our lives much easier.

If the volume of e-mail really gets on top of us and we can't find time to answer it all, then the first e-mails we discard will be the ones from people who don't look as if they have made a reasonable effort to solve their own problems. This is not intended to cause offence; it's occasionally a necessary response to a serious problem. We get a lot of e-mail. Really.

Also, the PuTTY contact email address is a mailing list. For this reason, e-mails larger than 40Kb will be held for inspection by the list administrator, and will not be allowed through unless they really appear to be worth their large size. Therefore:

Section B.2: Reporting bugs

If you think you have found a bug in PuTTY, your first steps should be:

If none of those options solved your problem, and you still need to report a bug to us, it is useful if you include some general information:

Section B.3: Requesting extra features

If you want to request a new feature in PuTTY, the very first things you should do are:

If you can't find your feature in either the development snapshots or the Wishlist, then you probably do need to submit a feature request. Since the PuTTY authors are very busy, it helps if you try to do some of the work for us:

Section B.4: Requesting features that have already been requested

If a feature is already listed on the Wishlist, then it usually means we would like to add it to PuTTY at some point. However, this may not be in the near future. If there's a feature on the Wishlist which you would like to see in the near future, there are several things you can do to try to increase its priority level:

Section B.5: Web server administration

If the PuTTY web site is down (Connection Timed Out), please don't bother mailing us to tell us about it. Most of us read our e-mail on the same machines that host the web site, so if those machines are down then we will notice before we read our e-mail. So there's no point telling us our servers are down.

Of course, if the web site has some other error (Connection Refused, 404 Not Found, 403 Forbidden, or something else) then we might not have noticed and it might still be worth telling us about it.

Section B.6: Asking permission for things

PuTTY is distributed under the MIT Licence (see appendix C for details). This means you can do almost anything you like with our software, our source code, and our documentation. The only things you aren't allowed to do are to remove our copyright notices or the licence text itself, or to hold us legally responsible if something goes wrong.

So if you want permission to include PuTTY on a magazine cover disk, or as part of a collection of useful software on a CD or a web site, then permission is already granted. You don't have to mail us and ask. Just go ahead and do it. We don't mind.

If you want to use parts of the PuTTY source code in another program, then it might be worth mailing us to talk about technical details, but if all you want is to ask permission then you don't need to bother. You already have permission.

Section B.7: Mirroring the PuTTY web site

All mirrors of the PuTTY web site are welcome. Please don't bother asking us for permission before setting up a mirror. You already have permission. We are always happy to have more mirrors.

If you mail us after you have set up the mirror, and remember to let us know which country your mirror is in, then we'll add it to the Mirrors page on the PuTTY website.

If you have technical questions about the process of mirroring, then you might want to mail us before setting up the mirror; but if you just want to ask for permission, you don't need to. You already have permission.

Section B.8: Praise and compliments

One of the most rewarding things about maintaining free software is getting e-mails that just say "thanks". We are always happy to receive e-mails of this type.

Regrettably we don't have time to answer them all in person. If you mail us a compliment and don't receive a reply, please don't think we've ignored you. We did receive it and we were happy about it; we just didn't have time to tell you so personally.

To everyone who's ever sent us praise and compliments, in the past and the future: you're welcome!

Section B.9: E-mail address

The actual address to mail is <putty@projects.tartarus.org>.

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