e31 Overview of send-pr

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Overview of send-pr

This documentation discusses send-pr which uses electronic mail to submit support questions and problem reports to a central Support Site. No body of work is perfect, and support organizations understand this; send-pr is designed to allow users who have problems to submit reports of these problems to sites responsible for supporting the products in question, in a defined form which can be read by an electronically managed database.

send-pr is part of a suite of programs known collectively as PRMS, the GNU Problem Report Management System. PRMS consists of several programs which, used in concert, formulate and partially administer a database of Problem Reports, or PRs, at a central Support Site. A PR goes through several states in its lifetime; PRMS tracks the PR and all information associated with it through each state and finally acts as an archive for PRs which have been closed.

Because send-pr exists as a shell (‘/bin/sh’) script and as an Elisp file for use with GNU Emacs, it can be used from any machine on your network which can run a shell script and/or Emacs.

In general, you can use any editor and mailer to submit valid Problem Reports, as long as the format required by PRMS is preserved. send-pr automates the process, however, and ensures that certain fields necessary for automatic processing are present.

send-pr is strongly recommended for all initial problem-oriented correspondence with your Support Site. The organization you submit Problem Reports to supplies an address to which further information can be sent; the person responsible for the category of the problem you report directly contacts you.

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