Chasing up old bug reports
I see from debian-devel and my mail that Sven Rudolph
<sr1@irz.inf.tu-dresden.de> has been chasing up some old bug reports.
Sve: I think this is a very good thing and I was wondering whether
you would like to be our official bug chaser-upper ?
We've had numerous volunteers for the post, but most of them didn't
actually do very much and disappeared after a mail message or two.
Since you've actually started out by doing useful work I think you
might be interested in the job :-).
Here are some things I wrote about the job the last few times it came
out. Note that it's not necessary for you to agree to do all of these
things - it would just be nice if you did some of them :-).
] We need someone with the time and inclination to go through our old
] bug reports and nag package maintainers about what they are doing
] about them.
]
] The successful applicant will exist :-). The ability to get other
] people to do things without upsetting them would be very useful in
] addition to this basic requirement for existence.
]
] Little or no technical expertise will be required - the ability to
] send and receive email and to deal with chasing up broken and bouncing
] mailers might be useful, but the bug-chaser-upper doesn't need to fix
] or even fully understand the bugs themselves.
]
] Reasonable email connectivity (a low round-trip time) and ability to
] use a WWW browser are essential.
] The noodge (I'll borrow Ian M.'s word, though I don't know what it
] means), should keep themselves aware of the `aged' bug reports and try
] to determine from the relevant package maintainers how soon they are
] likely to be fixed and whether or not the package maintainer would
] like some help or even someone to take over the package.
]
] Our development process should be reasonably conducive to people
] taking over each others' packages, even on quite a short temporary
] basis, and/or sending each other patches or whatever.
]
] Posting a status summary every once in a while, giving rough details
] of the information collected, would be useful. I don't know what
] `once in a while' means, but weekly would probably be far too
] frequent. Around monthly would probably be good.
]
] Ideally the noodge should keep track of when developers `expected time
] to fix' was wildly exceeded and try to get a revised estimate.
] Hopefully this will give the package maintainer some impetus to do
] something about it, and allow us to detect disappeared maintainers.
]
] It's been so long since we had anyone filling the job that you should
] probably start from scratch. However, several of the packages with
] the oldest reports have changed maintainers recently, so you might
] like to get details about the latest state from Ian Murdock.
Ian.
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