you can help triage bzr bugs

[Martin Pool]

I'd like to encourage more people to get into Bazaar bug triage.  This
may be a bit scary for both developers and new qa people, but I think
it's worth while and may help us develop everything faster.

Anyone can play.  If you are interested, here's what you can do:

 * Subscribe to bug mail under <https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bzr> and skim it
 * Look at, for instance, the new bugs in
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr/+bugs?search=Search&field.status=New>
 * See if you can find a duplicate, just by searching for a similar message
 * Tag them with the relevant area
 * If the description is vague, and it often is, try to improve it
 * If you can think of a workaround or something to get more data, say so
 * If it seems like a real bug and not a dupe, mark it confirmed

Developers read the bug mail and will catch any mistakes.

Triage according to;

 * critical: data loss or seriously broken functionality
 * high: blocks work for some people
 * low: otherwise

I think much of this can be done without needing a lot of knowledge of
the internals, if we do it the right way.  And that is:

 developers: be nice to people who make mistakes in trying to triage;
if they do something wrong with good intentions then change it and
explain why you did so

 triagers: be bold but not reckless and take constructive feedback on
board; if in doubt say "maybe this is xxx" and even doing that will
help

You'd have to expect that it will take a while for people to learn to
do this the same way that the core developers do, but it doesn't need
to be a long or painful process.  And anyhow, non-developers may have
a different and valuable perspective.

If you're going to have a go at this, feel free to ask here or on irc.

Ian mentioned having a bzr-qa subteam, and this is perhaps a baby step
towards that.

I think it's realistic to expect we could fairly quickly get some
triagers who're often helping users faster than they are helped now,
letting developers fix more bugs, and rarely having any changes
undone.  If it works, it would be pretty cool.
-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>