Announcing the relaunch of the Fedora BugZappers!
Building on the recent success of the recent "gcc43 rebuild triage
effort", we are pleased to announce the official re-launch of the
Fedora Bug Triage Process!
Are you frustrated, because you would like to help to Fedora
community, but you couldn't write a line of code if your life depended
on it? You don't feel qualified to help with the Art project, and you
can't translate documentation?
Do not despair. Anyone can be a bug triager. No special education or
background is required in order to triage bugs. You do not even have
to know anything about programming!
Bug triagers are the first line of defense for Fedora developers. We
strive to make it easy for developers to focus on bugs that are worth
their precious time (so that hopefully they will have more time for
resolving your bugs :-)). We do this by performing simple tasks like
requesting additional information to clarify reported problems and
verify that the bug is filed correctly, and verifying the bug is not a
duplicate of one already filed.
Have you ever reported a bug, but been frustrated because no one
responded to it? Have you ever been annoyed by having your bug closed
without ever receiving a single reply?
Are you looking for a meaningful way to contribute to Fedora that does
not require you to be a developer or package maintainer? Do you have
a genuine desire to help people? Do you want to learn more about a
particular component within Fedora?
If so, then the triage team is for you!
There are two ways to get started. If you already feel comfortable
triaging bugs you can start today by following the instructions at:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/GettingStarted
If you'd prefer a little training first, we are in the process of
arranging some online training sessions and are waiting for people to
specify the time that works best for them. We are planning to conduct
sessions at various times that work for people. If you are already a
Fedora contributor with wiki edit access, add your name to
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Training.
If you are do not yet have wiki edit access, here are four different
ways to make contact with us:
1) Create a wiki account by following the instructions here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/WikiEditing#Getting_Edit_Access and add
your name to the wiki.
2) Subscribe to fedora-test-list(a)redhat.com at
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-test-list and mention
on the list that you are interested in attending a triage training
session along with a preferred day and time.
3) Stop by #fedora-qa IRC channel on the Freenode server
(irc.freenode.net). Someone is usually around that will be glad to
help you get set up.
4) Come to our weekly IRC meeting on #fedora-meeting. Our current
meeting schedule is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Meetings
To show an example of what Fedora bug triagers do consider a recent
project when we made a noticeable impact by triaging bugs for the
mass-rebuild of packages using GCC 4.3. Not sure what GCC is? No
problem. Suffice it to say that the entire collection of packages
compiled with GCC (the C compiler used in Fedora) had to be rebuilt
for a new version coming out in Fedora 9. Five hundred forty two
individual source packages failed to rebuild automatically for one
reason or another. The triage team reduced this to approximately 160
source packages that were true "failure to compile" errors. The other
packages had different problems that were unrelated to the compiler.
This first sweep by the triage team helped save release engineering
and the package maintainers time, by seeing that the bugs got put in
the right place.
There are lots of opportunities to make a noticeable difference as a
bug triager. Come join us!
--
Jon Stanley
Fedora Bug Wrangler
jstanley(a)fedoraproject.org