The best bug reports are pull requests

A friend of mine has a little poster by his wall that says, "Stacktrace or GTFO" for all people who give him bug reports. It follows the same mentality as this - the more resources you can provide a developer for a bug report, the a.) faster it'll be fixed and b.) the happier the developer will be. I think you're right though, a pull request is pretty much like spoon feeding the bug to the developer. That said, I think he's right in that it might clutter up the repo a bit with bug examples - if pull reqs for bugs become common place (and I hope they do) it'd be nice to have a way to classify them as such (or perhaps there is a way that I don't know about yet?).

In general, when I have an issue, I try to produce a small snippet of code that shows the problem. I haven't done it as a unit test before, but I don't think I've ever submitted a bug report to a project that has them...<p>It helps both me and the developer, because the developer can run the code and see if he fixed -my- problem, rather than -a- problem, and I can run it afterwards to verify that it's fixed. I've also had it show that the same code will hit many bugs before it works... This allows the developer to fix it all the way down.

*pull requests containing a new, failing test. Love it.