Fedora Bug Day Tomorrow: March 3rd 2004: Don't Bug Mark Day

[Jef Spaleta]

What: Fedora Bug Day: Learn to be a package shepherd
Help us out with Fedora Core triage by picking your favorite
Fedora Core package and acting as its community shepherd, by helping
the package maintainer keep up with bug reports and submitted patches
and so on and so forth.

Alan Cox I think said it best:
"Track the bugs in your favorite package/component:
* try to make a few minutes everyday to look through the new bugs filed
in the last day for the package you want to watch.
* Sign up for the upstream mailing lists and bug tracking system, so you
can more effectively be able to move bugs reported to Fedora upstream
where they are more likely to be fixed."

And to put a finer point on it Warren Togami adds:
"Most projects don't have anything like an effective bug tracker of
their own. Because of that, what we need are volunteers to serve as
liaison to upstream projects. They should be members of those upstream
mailing lists and pay attention to news/patches/security alerts there.
Such helpers if they are diligent would be like assistants to the
package maintainers, and learn things as they go as well as gain trust
in the process"

When:   March 3rd, starting at 14:00 UTC  (09:00 EST)

Where: #fedora-bugs channel on freenode irc network

How: 
Come to the #fedora-bugs channel on the freenode irc network tomorrow
and be a part of the discussion. Instead of writing a very long drawn
out explanation of what you should be doing as a package shepherd. I'll
just point you to an example. 
http://www.ottolander.nl/gnome-panel/

I think leonardjo created a very useful shepherding tool with this
simple static table. I think people might be able to do a lot of good
taking this static table summary example and reusing it for other
packages in Fedora Core. Poor Mark, he had to be the guinea pig package
maintainer for leonardjo's proactive shepherding experiment.  So instead
of just picking on Mark, maybe its time to pick on..err i mean help...a
few more package maintainers as well.  So come on over to the
#fedora-bugs channel tomorrow, pick a fedora core package you would like
to start shepherding and start digging into the steaming pile of bugs
waiting for you in bugzilla.

What else: 
And if you can't be a package shepherd just yet, you're you can still be
useful for general Fedora Core Triage, and help clean out
the cobwebs in bugzilla so developers can find the bugreports that need
attention.
 
Huh:  No Clue What I'm talking about when I say the phrase Fedora
Triage?
Take a quick look at the fedora-triage-list archives:
https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/fedora-triage-list/
These messages should hopefully tell you what its all about in more
detail:
http://tinyurl.com/ywma3 - Summary of my vision for Fedora Triage
http://tinyurl.com/23alw - My short term goals and long term plan

-jef"black belt cat herder"spaleta