Low bug triage activity all around

[Matt Fischer]

On 01/02/2013 04:47 AM, Maarten Bezemer wrote:
> On Tuesday 01 January 2013 22:21:41 Omer Akram wrote:
>> So I think we need to think of some ways to improve the situation and get
>> more people involved into this effort. Does anyone have
>> suggestions/comments about this matter.
> Personally, I would love to help out where possible. But, it is quite
> overwhelming. I think it would help greatly to reinstate mentors again, maybe
> in another way, so people are willing to become mentor again?
>
> Or if mentors are (still) not viable (anymore), it might help to create some
> kind of (extensive) tutorial, which guides new users through to overwhelming
> triaging, different project types,  testing patches, fixing bugs, etc.
>
> Personally, my problem is that I do not know where to start, eventhough I am
> trying to help out for a long time already... How to find suitable bugs for an
> inexperienced triager like myself. It basically is all 'too much'.
>
> Regards,
>    Maarten
>

I don't know the history of why/when the mentors program was stopped, 
but I can say that without my MOTU mentor I'd never make as much 
progress as I have on doing packaging updates and assorted fixes. I'd be 
happy to volunteer to mentor someone for triaging.

As for where to start, my advice to a new person is actually to pick a 
package and focus on the bugs there. I did this when I started on 
gnome-nettool, one that had a manageable number of bugs and then I 
triaged it and cleaned up the list of open bugs substantially (did some 
patches too). This may not work for everyone, but it worked well for me. 
It also helps if the package you pick is in a programming 
language/toolkit you know if you plan on doing fixes.



-- 

Matthew (Matt) Fischer
LP: http://launchpad.net/~mfisch
IRC: mfisch