W-PuTTY-CD Feedback
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PuTTY Team
- General Guidelines
- Other places to ask for help
- Reporting bugs
- Reporting documentations bugs
- Requesting a new API
- Requesting extra features
- Asking permission for things
- Praise and complements
- E-mail address
This is a guide to providing feedback to the W-PuTTY-CD development team, the
General guidelines section holds guide lines
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 adding a new API and feature requests.
Note: We used part of the materials from
Appendix B of the
PuTTY manual
while writing this page, only materials relevant to the PuTTY's source code.
PuTTY manual is copyright 2001-2007 Simon Tatham. All rights reserved. and
distributed under the MIT licence.
If you can possibly try to solve your own problem by reading the
manuals, reading the FAQ, reading the web sites, both of PuTTY and W-PuTTY-CD,
asking other developers, searching MSDN, posting to a newsgroup (see
Places to ask for help), or any
other means, then this will make live much easier, and you will not waste your
time waiting for us.
Please if you have a problem about PuTTY don't mail it to us, at the same
time don't mail problems about W-PuTTY-CD to PuTTY team, unless you are sure
that this problem is also in PuTTY.
Please use a meaningful and attractive subject line on your message, don't
use common subjects lines like ‘A WPuTTYCD.DLL bug’.
MSDN, This
portion of Microsoft
responsible for managing the firm's relationship with developers.
This is Usenet newsgroups that are particularly relevant to the SSH protocol,
Telnet protocol and Linux such as:
Please use MSDN and the newsgroup most appropriate to your query, as they are general
and not specifically about PuTTY or W-PuTTY-CD.
If you don't have direct access to Usenet, you can access these newsgroups
through Google Groups (groups.google.com).
If you think you have found a bug in W-PuTTY-CD, your first steps should be:
- Check Microsoft Developers Network
MSDN, most
probably if you spend reasonable time you will find the solution, also you
will extend your knowledge about MS Windows and windows developments
environments.
- Check the
PuTTY Wishlist page, only parts related to PuTTY
communications, and see if PuTTY team already know
about the problem. If PuTTY team do, it is almost certainly not necessary to
mail anyone about it.
- Check the
PuTTY Changes Log, only parts related to PuTTY communications, and see if PuTTY team have already
fixed the bug in the development snapshots, then most probably this fix is
included in W-PuTTY-CD latest development snapshot, if not included then
only notify us.
- Check the
PuTTY FAQs
related to communication, (also provided as
appendix A in the PuTTY manual), and see if it answers your question.
The FAQ lists the most common things which people think are bugs in PuTTY, but which
aren't bugs.
- Check the Wishlist
page, and see if your problem is already listed, if listed it is not necessary to mail us
about it.
- Check the Change Log, and see if
your bug is already fixed in the
development snapshots.
- Check the
FAQ, and see if it answers your question. The FAQ
lists the most common things which people may think of as bugs.
- Download the latest development snapshot and see if the problem still
happens with that. As a general rule we don't want to waste either your time
or ours in bugs that appear in the release version but not in the
development version, as this means that these bugs are
already fixed. On the other hand, if you can find a bug in the
development version that doesn't appear in the release, then this is what we
want to hear from you, hurry up and report this bug.
If you followed all of the above points in sequence and you still need to report a
bug to us, it is useful if you include some general information:
- Tell us what version of W-PuTTY-CD you are linking
with. you can get the version from "W-PuTTY-CD About Box".
- Tell us what protocol you are connecting with: SSH, Telnet, Rlogin, Raw mode
or Serial.
- Tell us what kind of server you are connecting to; what OS; what OS
version, and if
possible what SSH or Telnet server (if you're using SSH or Telnet). You can get some of this
information from the W-PuTTY-CD Event Log, which is actually PuTTY Event Log (see
section 3.1.3.1 in the PuTTY manual).
- Send us the contents of the W-PuTTY-CD Event Log, unless you have a
specific reason not to (for example, if it contains confidential information
that you think we should be able to solve your problem without needing to
know).
- Try to give us as much information as you can to help us see the problem
for ourselves. If possible, give us a step-by-step sequence of precise
instructions for reproducing the fault, your calling stack, part of your
calling code, or any other thing that will make our life more easier.
- Tell us exactly and precisely what you did and what it
did, and also tell us exactly and precisely what you think it should have
done instead. you may think that W-PuTTY-CD does the wrong thing, meanwhile it
is doing the right thing and only your expectations were
wrong. Help to avoid this problem by telling us exactly what you think it
should have done, and exactly what it did do.
- If you think you can, you're welcome to try to fix the problem yourself.
A patch to the code which fixes a bug is an excellent
addition to a bug report. However, a patch is never a substitute
for a good bug report; if your patch is wrong or inappropriate, and you
haven't supplied us with full information about the actual bug, then we
won't be able to find a better solution.
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html is a very
good
article on how to report bugs effectively in general. If your bug report is
particularly unclear, we may ask you to go away and have little bit
fun, this will help you to concentrate more, read this article,
have little bit fun, then report the bug again.
It is reasonable to report bugs in W-PuTTY-CD's documentation or in this
site, if you think the documentation is unclear or unhelpful and/or you can provide
us with something better, then your first steps should be:
- You need to
give exact details of what you think the documentation has failed
to tell you, or how you think it could be made clearer. If your problem
is simply that you don't understand the documentation, we suggest
searching Places to ask for help and seeing if someone will explain what you need to know.
- If you think the documentation could usefully have told you that,
send us a bug report and explain how you think we should change it, then try to
re-write the section you want to change, and send us a copy. This site
is yours as well only remember that we want to keep on PuTTYs site style.
- If the one you wrote it better than the one on this site, we will
include yours, but without mentioning any thing about you, as you know we can
not insert a paragraph at the end of every section saying this section is
written by "This Person".
If you want to request a new API, or a new event, the very first things you
should do are:
- Check the
Wishlist page on the W-PuTTY-CD website, and see if
a similar API is
already on the list. If it is, it probably won't achieve very much to repeat
the request.
- Check the Change Log on the W-PuTTY-CD website, and see if we have already added
a similar API in the development snapshots. If it isn't clear, download the latest
development snapshot and see if this API is present. If it is, then it
will also be in the next release and there is no need to mail us at all.
If you can't find your API in either the development snapshots or
the Wishlist, then you probably do need to submit a a new API request. Since you
can find thousands of methods by which you can call W-PuTTY-CD APIs, and doesn't
make sense to support all of them. But it helps if you first try to do some of the work for us:
- Tell us why this particular API is required in library.
- Send us a sample of code, showing us how you want to
call this API.
- Try to build this API using the W-PuTTY-CD standard
APIs, and send us a sample.
If you want to request a new feature in W-PuTTY-CD, the very first things you
should do are:
- Check the
PuTTY
Wishlist page,
only parts related to PuTTY communications, and see if your feature is already
on the list. If it is, it probably won't achieve very much to repeat the
request.
- Check the
PuTTY Change Log,
only parts related to PuTTY communications, and see if they have already added your
feature in the development snapshots, If it is clear that it is included,
then there is no need to mail us.
- Check the
Wishlist page, and see if your feature is
already on the list. If it is, only be more patent, and wait for it with us.
- Check the Change Log on the W-PuTTY-CD website, and see if we have already added your
feature in the development snapshots. Is it is, then there is no need to
mail us, but you may decide to download the latest
development snapshot to use till the next release, but remember that the
next release may be quite different than the current development snapshot.
If still you can't find your feature, then you probably do need to submit a feature request. Since we
may be very busy, it helps if you try to do some of the work for us:
- If you can program, it may be worth offering to write the feature
yourself and send us a patch. However, it is likely to be helpful if you
confer with us first; there may be design issues you haven't thought of, or
we may be about to make big changes to the code which your patch would clash
with, or something. If you check with the maintainers first, there is a
better chance of your code actually being usable. Also, read the design
principles listed in
appendix D of the PuTTY manual: if you do not conform to them, we will probably not be able
to accept your patch.
PuTTY and W-PuTTY-CD both are distributed under the MIT Licence (see
Licence 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 change W-PuTTY-CD About Box, or to hold us legally responsible
if something goes wrong.
If you want to distribute W-PuTTY-CD "WPuTTYCD.DLL" alongside your own application for use
with that application, then we recommend, but we do insist, that you offer your
own first-line technical support, to answer questions about the interaction of
W-PuTTY-CD with your application and environment. If your users mail us directly, we won't be
able to tell them anything useful about your specific application or setup.)
If you want to use parts of the "W" and "CD" 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 according to the
Licence.
If you just want to link to our web site, or use parts of it without
violating any copyrights, just go ahead. (It's not clear that
we could stop you doing this, even if we wanted to!)
One of the most rewarding things about maintaining free software is getting
e-mails ‘holding a lot of thanks’. Sure we are always happy to receive this
types of e-mails from you.
Regrettably may be we don't have enough time to answer them all in person. If you mail us a
compliment and don't receive a reply, please don't ever think
that 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! but don't forget to send the same mail to
the PuTTY team <putty@projects.tartarus.org>.
The actual address to mail is <feedback@winputty.com>.
If you want to comment on this web site, or modify any of its contents,
E-Mail:
web@winputty.com