Appendix C. Bugs and Bug Fixes

There are no perfect programs. GNU Emacs is very thoroughly debugged, but it is certainly possible to find things that don't work correctly.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) welcomes problem reports. However, they need to be real problem reports; simple differences of opinion about how something should work are not bugs. If you think that a certain command should work differently, remember that Emacs has been around for a long time and has many users; it can't be changed to satisfy a single user. (On the other hand, in most cases, you could write some Lisp to change it yourself.) In the GNU Emacs Manual, the FSF publishes some excellent guidelines for reporting bugs, which we'll summarize very quickly:

We will add one very important guideline:

If you do have a bug to report, type M-x report-emacs-bug to send it from within Emacs. You'll be prompted for a subject line and dropped into Emacs' interface for sending mail. If mail from Emacs isn't set up properly, you can email using your preferred mail client. Be sure to include an informative subject line that summarizes the problem.