5. Follow-up

Once your problem report has been filed, you will receive a confirmation by email which will include the tracking number that was assigned to your problem report and a URL you can use to check its status. With a little luck, someone will take an interest in your problem and try to address it, or, as the case may be, explain why it is not a problem. You will be automatically notified of any change of status, and you will receive copies of any comments or patches someone may attach to your problem report's audit trail.

If someone requests additional information from you, or you remember or discover something you did not mention in the initial report, please use one of two methods to submit your followup:

• The easiest way is to use the followup link on the individual PR's web page, which you can reach from the PR search page. Clicking on this link will bring up an an email window with the correct To: and Subject: lines filled in (if your browser is configured to do this).

• Alternatively, you can just mail it to <bug-followup@FreeBSD.org>, making sure that the tracking number is included in the subject so the bug tracking system will know what problem report to attach it to.

  Note: If you do not include the tracking number, GNATS will become confused and create an entirely new PR which it then assigns to the GNATS administrator, and then your followup will become lost until someone comes in to clean up the mess, which could be days or weeks afterwards.

  Wrong way:

  Subject: that PR I sent
  

  Right way:

  Subject: Re: ports/12345: compilation problem with foo/bar
  

If the problem report remains open after the problem has gone away, just send a follow-up (in the manner prescribed above) saying that the problem report can be closed, and, if possible, explaining how or when the problem was fixed.