8.4 Reporting Bugs

You are welcome to send bug reports about GNU Wget to bug-wget@gnu.org.

Before actually submitting a bug report, please try to follow a few simple guidelines.

1. Please try to ascertain that the behavior you see really is a bug. If Wget crashes, it's a bug. If Wget does not behave as documented, it's a bug. If things work strange, but you are not sure about the way they are supposed to work, it might well be a bug.
2. Try to repeat the bug in as simple circumstances as possible. E.g. if Wget crashes while downloading wget -rl0 -kKE -t5 -Y0 http://yoyodyne.com -o /tmp/log, you should try to see if the crash is repeatable, and if will occur with a simpler set of options. You might even try to start the download at the page where the crash occurred to see if that page somehow triggered the crash.

   Also, while I will probably be interested to know the contents of your .wgetrc file, just dumping it into the debug message is probably a bad idea. Instead, you should first try to see if the bug repeats with .wgetrc moved out of the way. Only if it turns out that .wgetrc settings affect the bug, mail me the relevant parts of the file.

3. Please start Wget with -d option and send us the resulting output (or relevant parts thereof). If Wget was compiled without debug support, recompile it—it is much easier to trace bugs with debug support on.

   Note: please make sure to remove any potentially sensitive information from the debug log before sending it to the bug address. The -d won't go out of its way to collect sensitive information, but the log will contain a fairly complete transcript of Wget's communication with the server, which may include passwords and pieces of downloaded data. Since the bug address is publically archived, you may assume that all bug reports are visible to the public.

4. If Wget has crashed, try to run it in a debugger, e.g. gdb `which wget` core and type where to get the backtrace. This may not work if the system administrator has disabled core files, but it is safe to try.