The GNOME team needs your help
Dear Debian/GNOME users,
Since the creation of the GNOME team, the GNOME packages have been in a
good state. As you may have followed, the packaging is going on at a
reasonable pace, and we have enough manpower for packaging new GNOME
versions, although not as fast as we'd like to.
However, it could be much better. One area where we've been constantly
lagging behind is the handling of bugs. Of course, release-critical bugs
or bugs that affect us directly are fixed. But some packages like
nautilus are rotting in the BTS with piles of bugs we simply can't
handle because we don't have the time. We don't know whether those bugs
are still here, we don't know whether they are known upstream, we don't
know how to reproduce them or we don't know where to start to fix them.
That's why we're requesting help about bug triage. This is a task any of
you can do, provided you have some time and know how to use the BTS and
Bugzilla.
What can you do for helping? Start at:
http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-gnome-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org
Here, you can look for packages needing attention. High numbers in the
bug columns are a good hint.
What to do to deal with a specific bug:
* Check whether you can reproduce the bug. If it's meant to be
easily reproducible, check whether it can be reproduced with the
latest version.
* Check whether a similar bug has been reported in
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ and whether it has a patch available.
* Check for a fix in the CVS tree. You don't need to grab patches
if you're not used to, pointing us at the relevant change is
enough.
* Forward the bug if it isn't reported there. Don't forget to add
pkg-gnome-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org in the Cc field.
If you think a bug is already fixed, you should close it. Otherwise,
once you have an idea of what can be done to fix the bug (a patch, a CVS
log, an idea on how to change the package), the best way to get the bug
fixed is to find a maintainer on #gnome-debian@GimpNet and harass him
until the fix is in our SVN repository.
In short, if you're willing to improve GNOME in Debian, your
contribution is welcome. Of course, people more familiar with GNOME
packaging are welcome to join the team itself to work on the packages.
--
.''`. Josselin Mouette /\./\
: :' : josselin.mouette@ens-lyon.org
`. `' joss@debian.org
`- Debian GNU/Linux -- The power of freedom
Reply to: