Problem Report Handling Guidelines
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# 2. Problem Report Life-cycle

- The Reporter submits a PR with send-pr(1) and receives a confirmation message.

- Joe Random Committer takes interest in the PR and assigns it to himself, or Jane Random BugBuster decides that Joe is best suited to handle it and assigns it to him.

- Joe has a brief exchange with the originator (making sure it all goes into the audit trail) and determines the cause of the problem. He then makes sure the cause is documented in the audit trail, and sets the PRs state to “analyzed”.

- Joe pulls an all-nighter and whips up a patch that he thinks fixes the problem, and submits it in a follow-up, asking the originator to test it. He then sets the PRs state to “feedback”.

- A couple of iterations later, both Joe and the originator are satisfied with the patch, and Joe commits it to `-CURRENT` (or directly to `-STABLE` if the problem does not exist in `-CURRENT`), making sure to reference the Problem Report in his commit log (and credit the originator if he submitted all or part of the patch) and, if appropriate, start an MFC countdown.

- If the patch does not need MFCing, Joe then closes the PR.

- If the patch needs MFCing, Joe leaves the Problem Report in “patched” state until the patch has been MFCed, then closes it.

> Note: Many PRs are submitted with very little information about the problem, and some are either very complex to solve, or just scratch the surface of a larger problem; in these cases, it is very important to obtain all the necessary information needed to solve the problem. If the problem contained within cannot be solved, or has occurred again, it is necessary to re-open the PR.

> Note: The “email address” used on the PR might not be able to receive mail. In this case, followup to the PR as usual and ask the originator (in the followup) to provide a working email address. This is normally the case when send-pr(1) is used from a system with the mail system disabled or not installed.

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