HowTo:Make A Bug Report
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Reporting bugs in POV-Ray
Bug reports are an essential part of development, and the developers need you to let them know about programming defects in POV-Ray. However, there are a few things that you need to keep in mind when you are thinking about submitting a bug report or requesting a new feature. Please take a few moments to read this brief list of guidelines before you open a new task in our Github Issue Tracking System.
Note: All issues still open in our previous FlySpray Bug Reporting System have been ported to the new Github Issue Tracking System. Please exclusively use Github for new issues and updates to open issues.
Guidelines for opening new tasks
- Take some minutes of your time and read this document, it will teach you how to report a bug correctly.
- If you're not sure it's a bug, or how to report it, chat with the folks in the beta-test forum.
- We cannot accept bug reports for modified versions of POV-Ray.
- In almost all cases where a rendering bug is being reported, we require a minimal sample scene causing the bug be submitted, as well as an image showing the problem.
- Always perform a search on both open and closed 'issues' or 'tasks' before opening a new one. Your bug might already have been reported, or your feature requested.
- Use the English language in any tasks you open. Nothing will get done if we can't understand you.
- Only report one bug or request one feature per task.
- If you report a bug, and we mark it as 'requires testing', then please test it and add a comment to the task telling us how well it works.
- If a task is closed as fixed then try the development version before requesting that it be re-opened.
- If we deny your request to re-open a task, check the history/comments for our reason. If you are unsatisfied with the reason, you are welcome to discuss it in the forums.
- Be polite. Remember that you got POV-Ray for free.
Text formatting tips
Github allows for a lot more formatting within task descriptions and comments. Here are a few helpful essentials:
- To quote some other comment, use the github quote feature after marking the text to be quoted.
- To make code, use the mark code feature of github after marking your code.
- Refer to github issues and pull request by number prefixed with # and github will create the link. Please refer to older Flyspray tasks by their numeric id preceded by "FS#" (e.g. FS#123) and perhaps insert the URL for as github will create the corresponding link.
- Do make use of the preview button.
Miscellaneous
- To illustrate your bug report or comment with images, test scenes or zip files, please do make use of the "attach file" functionality, rather than linking to some 3rd party image hosting site. This way the uploaded files will remain accessible as long as the github issue persists. Note when uploading scene related files the POV-Ray extensions of .pov and .inc are not supported; needing an additional .txt suffix before upload. Further .tar and .gz files are not supported as of this writing, but rather only .zip.