3 Contacting the FreeBSD Project

3.1 Email and Mailing Lists

For any questions or general technical support issues, please send mail to the FreeBSD general questions mailing list.

If you're tracking the 6-STABLE development efforts, you must join the FreeBSD-CURRENT mailing list, in order to keep abreast of recent developments and changes that may affect the way you use and maintain the system.

Being a largely-volunteer effort, the FreeBSD Project is always happy to have extra hands willing to help--there are already far more desired enhancements than there is time to implement them. To contact the developers on technical matters, or with offers of help, please send mail to the FreeBSD technical discussions mailing list.

Please note that these mailing lists can experience significant amounts of traffic. If you have slow or expensive mail access, or are only interested in keeping up with major FreeBSD events, you may find it preferable to subscribe instead to the FreeBSD announcements mailing list.

All of the mailing lists can be freely joined by anyone wishing to do so. Visit the FreeBSD Mailman Info Page. This will give you more information on joining the various lists, accessing archives, etc. There are a number of mailing lists targeted at special interest groups not mentioned here; more information can be obtained either from the Mailman pages or the mailing lists section of the FreeBSD Web site.

3.2 Submitting Problem Reports

Suggestions, bug reports and contributions of code are always valued--please do not hesitate to report any problems you may find. Bug reports with attached fixes are of course even more welcome.

The preferred method to submit bug reports from a machine with Internet mail connectivity is to use the send-pr(1) command. “Problem Reports” (PRs) submitted in this way will be filed and their progress tracked; the FreeBSD developers will do their best to respond to all reported bugs as soon as possible. A list of all active PRs is available on the FreeBSD Web site; this list is useful to see what potential problems other users have encountered.

Note that send-pr(1) itself is a shell script that should be easy to move even onto a non-FreeBSD system. Using this interface is highly preferred. If, for some reason, you are unable to use send-pr(1) to submit a bug report, you can try to send it to the FreeBSD problem reports mailing list.

For more information, “Writing FreeBSD Problem Reports”, available on the FreeBSD Web site, has a number of helpful hints on writing and submitting effective problem reports.