August 10, 2011

How to file a good bug about FTP-related bugs in Chrome

I have just done a little clean-up of the bugtracker and closed old FTP bugs which don't have enough information to fix them. Of course those bugs can still be re-opened after reporters respond on them.

One of the most important rules for bugs is: please submit information you're asked to submit. If you're unable to follow-up, it's very likely your problem can't be fixed because of missing info.

Generally when filing an FTP-related bug, you should provide:

  • version number of Chrome
  • URL that causes the problem
  • detailed description of the issue (steps to reproduce, expected result, actual result, etc).

Furthermore, if the FTP site is not public, just the URL or description is usually not enough to fix any problem. What's needed is either:

  • raw directory listing (if you see anything like that in the error message, it should be obvious what to do), or
  • Wireshark/other sniffer's dump of network traffic.
If you're unable to provide that info, but are able to identify the name of the FTP server software serving the site, there is still a chance that the problem can be reproduced by installing that FTP software on developer's machine.

Finally, when submitting the raw directory listing, please don't just copy-paste it, because that results in implicit character set conversions. Use the browser's "Save As" command to save the raw listing to disk, and then attach that file to your bug report.