Unfortunately, qualifying bug reports (finding dupes, going back to the
reporter for missing information) can only be done by people who know
exactly what real problems are and what's needed to resolve them.
This is simply untrue. I am currently about halfway through a bug triage
of all Fedora 7 kernel bugs and am doing so solely on the basis of one
page from the wiki which the kernel team put together. I know nothing of
kernel code but I do know having had a few pointers from people in the
know what information to request under what circumstances. If I can do
that for the kernel I'm sure the same goes for any application.
Exactly. If you are one of those people who wants to help, but isn't a
good programmer, then bug triaging is a great way to help! It's also a
good way to start learning the code and open-source methods, if you are
interested in coding (even small patches help)!
My programming skills are pretty mediocre, but I've closed 1000+ bugs in
the gnome bugzilla in the past year (mostly by focusing on one
particular area of interest).
Interested volunteers should start here:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/bugsquad/
Non-programmers can also help with translation and documentation, among
other things:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gdp/
I think you just need to dive right into bugzilla and whatever component
interests you then start with that. Bug triage is quite rewarding and
people actually feel a little loved. Surely there is nothing like the
hurt and pain of an un-answered bug report?
And if you can't do that... then at least make sure that your pet-peeve
bugs are correctly reported in the upstream bugzilla (unless it's a
Fedora-specific bug) with complete stacktraces and steps-to-reproduce,
so that the developers have a good starting point. And if bug-buddy pops
up after a crash, make sure you give a good description of what
triggered the crash in the comments field!
Really, people can help a lot, even if they aren't skilled programmers.
- Mike
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