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I recently stumbled across an annoying flaw in a package that I require, which pretty much makes a mess of good chunk of my documents. That made me wonder whether there was some central repository of data about bugs and their status. It would be particularly helpful, for example, to have some idea of whether a bug had a recommended patch that was likely to survive updates, or whether a package was actively maintained.

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orome
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    The short answer here is 'no', as each package author is responsible for their own code. – Joseph Wright Jul 03 '12 at 14:00
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    @JosephWright: Thank goodness for Tex.SE then, and for the fact that so many package authors are here and participate actively. – orome Jul 03 '12 at 14:02
  • Usually Most of the authors maintain their project at github or sourceforge etc.. There is not single hub bug tracker for all latex packages. Yes I joined Tex.SE for this purpose to know if my bug is noticed by others. – texenthusiast Jul 03 '12 at 14:16
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    @texlearner: not most authors, only a few ... –  Jul 03 '12 at 15:25
  • Then the last resort option of Tex.SE becomes the main option to share the bug problems. – texenthusiast Jul 03 '12 at 15:38
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    @texlearner: no, one should read the documentation of the package how the author like to handle a bug report. –  Jul 03 '12 at 15:45
  • Usually i go by the texdoc latex package name to resolve the bug problem, if it persists i try email/ reporting to bug tracker of the author. Normally i get a solution easily, sometimes the authors are also occupied with something or other, not that they don't want to respond. In the meanwhile, to find the workaround tweaks can be found at Tex.SE due to the expertise here or even solutions by the author itself. Henceforth I said as a last resort option if nothing works. – texenthusiast Jul 03 '12 at 15:57

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There isn't a central repository of bug information. CTAN is the closest thing to a central repository; it keeps reasonably accurate data of the maintenance status of packages, although there's never a guarantee that a package listed as "maintained" is still actively maintained, especially if it is an older package that hasn't had an update for a while. (This is not to say that older packages aren't maintained: many are, and lack of updates simply reflects lack of bugs.)

As mentioned in the comments, some package authors now maintain public repositories of their packages on GitHub, BitBucket, Sourceforge, etc. The advantage of this is that these sites provide good bug/issue tracking. For a list of package authors/maintainers who are active on the site with links to their repositories (if they exist) see:

There is also some information about bugs here on the site, but as a general rule, it's better to contact the author of a package directly with bug reports rather than post them as questions here. See the following questions for more discussion on that matter.

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Alan Munn
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There is a database for the LaTeX core: http://www.latex-project.org/bugs.html. This is for all files/packages in the directory $TEXMF/tex/latex/base/. All other packages have their own way for reporting bugs/problems.

Alan Munn
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    yes that database can also be used for latex/tools latex/graphics babel and (to an extent) amsmath. Just type latex latexbug for these cases. – David Carlisle Jul 03 '12 at 14:55
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The short answer has already been given by Joseph Wright: No.

But I'd like to amend the short answer:

You might know, you can download all packages from a mirror of CTAN. But CTAN itself is run by more or less three persons, who are serving there since many years. Without them, no CTAN.[1]

So if any reader of this question considers asking for more than the packages on CTAN, namely a bugzilla or whatever: We depend on people who contribute their work to maintain our infrastructure and even at the very heart of it there is a lack of people.

[1] There was an article on this topic in the quarterly magazin of the German TUG (Dante): TeXnische Komödie, 2/2011, 21 ff., by Rainer Schöpf and Joachim Schrod

Keks Dose
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