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. <div class="gmail_quote"> On 15 February 2011 20:41, Brian Curtis <<a href="mailto:bcurtiswx@ubuntu.com">bcurtiswx@ubuntu.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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 <a href="http://freedesktop.org" target="_blank">freedesktop.org</a>. 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!!" ---------------------------------------------------------------- The Statement Below is True The Statement Above is False ---------------------------------------------------------------- -- Ubuntu-bugsquad mailing list <a href="mailto:Ubuntu-bugsquad@lists.ubuntu.com">Ubuntu-bugsquad@lists.ubuntu.com</a> <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugsquad" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugsquad</a> </blockquote></div> -- <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/phillw" target="_blank">https://wiki.ubuntu.com/phillw</a>