Communicating more frequently with your upstream maintainers

[Phill Whiteside]

Hiyas,

I'd 100% agree with that, my interactions with Fabian who looks after
Chromium has been fantastic, getting to know the upstream people is really
good.

Regards,

Phill.

On 15 February 2011 20:41, Brian Curtis <bcurtiswx at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> 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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