Communicating more frequently with your upstream maintainers

[Brian Curtis]

Hi fellow triagers,

I wanted to pass along some words of wisdom to those who typically
triage bugs with specific packages (a.k.a. adopted a package).

It's extremely important that you take some time every now and then to
talk with those individuals who maintain your packages upstream about
bug reports.  This has a lot of benefits to both upstream and Ubuntu
as it opens up communication between both parties and allows for
problems and props to be exchanged.

For a great example, I do a lot of triaging with Empathy and I am
constantly forwarding bugs upstream, and lately have been getting into
fixing them.  Like most of you, there are certain wiki's and general
triaging techniques that I use in order to give upstream to most
information.  Along with that there are a few individuals who help me
out maintaining Empathy and as a group I wanted to make sure we were
doing the best job we could to help make their volunteer efforts
easier.

My main form of communication to them was through their mailing list.
This allows them to reply to your inquiry on their own time.  This
shows a lot of respect to them. There are times when too many people
try to communicate in channels when they're busy triaging and fixing
bugs themselves.  You don't want to be annoying *puts tongue in
cheek*.

The main reply I received was a very nice and informative one.  I was
surprised at how thankful they were at the work we had done for them,
they mentioned how a majority of their reports on the bugzilla site
were from launchpad reports and that their need for us was great.
Definitely made me believe we were doing a fairly good job, and kept
me encouraged to keep going.

I was very happy though, to receive a list of things they hoped we
could improve upon.  With empathy there are many telepathy components
that are involved in making the user experience what it is and they
hoped that we could do a better job distinguishing between the two
when forwarding upstream.  Empathy bugs go to bugzilla.gnome while
telepathy bugs go to freedesktop.org.  Past that they wanted to make
sure that we ensured that all crash reports had backtraces, stack
traces and steps to reproduce among other things for certain types of
bugs.  It's painful to upstream when the person forwarding the bug
upstream can't reproduce the problem themselves.  WE MUST MAKE SURE
THE BUG IS REPRODUCIBLE BEFORE SUBMITTING UPSTREAM.

It's my duty, now that I have communicated with upstream, to relay
this to the other individuals who help me with the bug reports so we
can make sure we're doing the right job.

The things I want everyone to take from this are as follows:
- It's important to communicate every few weeks with your upstream maintainers.
- It's important to know the packages you're forwarding upstream in as
much detail as you can if you've adopted the package, as each upstream
has different ways they want things done.
- It's important to know the others who work on bugs with you, as
passing improvements across a team is crucial.  The most common reason
a triager doesn't do things right is because they just don't know
better.

I have a suggestion to bug adopters:
- Set up a bug team for the package you're working on.
- Get their contact information whether it be e-mail, jabber, AIM etc...
- Open your time up to team members. Make them feel more than welcome
to ask you questions about bug reports.
- Be a leader

Best,
~Brian

-- 
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
--Wernher Von Braun
"The second law of thermodynamics: If you think things are in a mess
now, JUST WAIT!!"
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