# Questions and Bug Reports

The PETSc maintenance e-mail, petsc-maint@mcs.anl.gov, is intended for users to

- report bugs,
- ask for clarification,
- ask for help in tracking down bugs, and
- request new features within PETSc.

We respond to almost all email the same day and many within the hour. Please do not send maintenance requests to the individual PETSc authors; all e-mail to petsc-maint@mcs.anl.gov is automatically distributed to all of the PETSc authors, so our response time using this address will be fastest.

Before sending a bug report, please consult the following:

- troubleshooting guide, and
- FAQ

to determine whether a fix or work-around to the problem already exists. Also, see the chapter "Hints for Performance Tuning" in the PETSc users manual for guidelines on achieving good efficiency within PETSc codes.

Guidelines for Bug Reports

The more information that you convey about a bug, the easier it will be for us to target the problem. We suggest providing the following information:

- If the problem involves installation, send the entire log file from running config/configure.py and make.
- Machine type: (e.g., sun4)
- OS Version: (run uname -a to get the version number)
- PETSc Version: (run PETSc program with -v, or look in include/petscversion.h)
- MPI implementation: (e.g., MPICH, LAM, IBM, SGI)
- Compiler: (e.g., Gnu C, Gnu g++, native C)
- Probable PETSc component: (for example, Mat, Vec, Draw, KSP, etc.)
- Problem description: Also, please cut and paste error messages from the compiler, program, etc.