is limited involvement in development desired/possible?

[Pasi Lallinaho]

Hello Jordan,

find comments inline.

On 2016-07-28 02:32, JMZ wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would be interested in helping with the development process, but I 
> haven't much time to devote to the endeavor.  Until now, I have merely 
> developed detours around any bugs in yakkety that I have encountered 
> so I can keep working.  If I do find bugs, where do I post the 
> launchpad report?  On this list with url?

With development versions, bugs that you find early in the cycle are 
best reported either on this mailing list or our IRC channel. This is 
because there's always packages that will break at the beginning of the 
cycle that will get fixed sooner than later, and the developers want to 
avoid a massive amount of bug reports.

That said, if a bug is related to a Xubuntu-specific package (eg. 
Thunar), it's likely that the bug is not related to issues mentioned 
above. In that case you can often report the bug on Launchpad - unless 
it's reported already.

If you are not sure which case is in question, you can ask the 
developers - again on this mailing list or the IRC channel. We will 
happily assist reporting bugs, and I'm sure with some experience you 
will become better and better with it yourself.

Finally, there's a whole section about dealing with bugs on the 
contributor documentation [1] which might help you with this or that issue.

> I don't right now have the ability to run multiple machines to test 
> 16.04 xenial lts and yakkety at the same time, so comparisons between 
> the stable and unstable versions are not possible.

That's OK. If we need comparisons, there are totally other people who 
are able to do that already.

For packages, a virtual machine installation would be fine as well 
though, so if you ever decide that you want to dig deeper into 
contributing, there are ways to do the comparison yourself.

> I won't have time to make the irc meetings. 

That's fine. The meeting minutes and logs will always be available 
online after the meeting, so if there is anything you need to know, you 
can find it there. If it's very important, it'll be posted on this 
mailing list as well.

> As seen, my participation will be quite limited. Any other ideas?

If you are running the development version and reporting any bugs you 
find, you are already doing valuable work.

If you want to extend further, you could do some installation tests for 
the development version. Again, that would mean likely a virtual machine 
setup for you.

There's a whole section about package and ISO testing on the contributor 
documentation [2] if you want to read more on that.


Obviously there's even more to do, if you or anybody else reading this 
mail think(s) you'd be up for even more stuff - or something completely.

We'll happily answer any further questions you might have.

Cheers,
Pasi

[1] http://docs.xubuntu.org/contributors/qa-bugs.html
[2] http://docs.xubuntu.org/contributors/qa-testing.html

-- 
Pasi Lallinaho (knome)       › http://open.knome.fi/
Leader of Shimmer Project    › http://shimmerproject.org/
Xubuntu Website Lead         › http://xubuntu.org/