Defect Report Content
The most important part of a bug report is to state the facts and only the facts. Please do not speculate about what you think went wrong, what "it seems to be doing," or which part of the program has the problem, because you may guess incorrectly and that will not help us. When we determine that a bug needs to be fixed, we first need to reproduce it.
Reporting the basic facts is relatively straightforward — you can copy and paste them directly from the screen, or take a screenshot — but there may be many important details that get lost. A bug report should contain at least the following:
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The exact steps from the beginning to the end of program execution, which we need to reproduce the problem. The content here must be complete. For example, if the input depends on a table and its data, and your report only provides a SELECT statement without the CREATE TABLE and INSERT statements, we would need to spend time reverse-engineering your database schema. Furthermore, even if we can execute the steps you provided using our own data, it is very likely that we will not be able to reproduce the issue you reported.
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The output you received. Please do not simply say "it doesn't work" or "the program crashed." If there is an error message, please provide it to us. If the program terminates due to an operating system error, please provide the operating system error message. If there is no output at all, please let us know that as well.
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Please describe in detail what you expected the output to be. If you only say something like "Oracle's output is not like this," we will not be able to understand your true intent.
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Please provide all command-line options and other system configuration items, including any relevant environment variables or configuration files that you have modified from the defaults.
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Please note anything you did differently from the installation instructions.
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Please provide the current software version.
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Please provide platform information, including operating system version, kernel name and version, C library, processor, memory information, etc.
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Any other information you consider valuable.
Please do not worry about your bug report being too long. In fact, we want your report to be as detailed as possible.