Reportbug and BTS
Hi there,
Following the advice given on Debian Mentors I've started going through the
various bug lists looking for reproducable, isolated and fixable bugs to help
out with. In the process I've become fairly comfortable with reportbug but
I've also come up with a few questions which don't seem to be addressed in
the documentation.
(1) Reportbug doesn't seem to have the ability to add tags during a
follow-up. Is there a feature I'm overlooking that allows this or is it
normal to send a follow-up through reportbug and a seperate hand written
message to control@bugs.debian.org?
Bugs #20715 and 49431
(2) When a bug is filed against the wrong package should I in submitting a
follow-up reassign the bug or should I simply point out that the problem lies
in another package and leave it to the package maintainer to reassign the
bug?
Bugs #187686 and 137135
(3) If a package maintainer has closed a bug due to a fix in the Unstable
version is it encouraged to fix, reopen and retag the bug (patch/stable) if
the problem persists in Woody? I can imagine that reopening bugs would piss
off quite a few maintainers, but on the flip side I use Stable on my servers
and primary workstation. A patch only applied to the Unstable version
doesn't really fix the problem for me.
Bugs #147494 and 143893 (For the second one I sent a patch directly to the
maintainer which fixes problems his patch missed.)
(4) Related to the last question, what sort of bugs qualify for fixes in
Stable - Proposed Updates? Does the package maintainer make that decision?
I can understand that maintainers probably don't want the hassle of
backporting fixes from upstream, but as a user I don't really see how a fix I
will not have access to for a year or more is really a fix.
(5) Although I like the idea of fixing bugs as a way of getting to know the
Debian community and ultimately start on the NM process, I'm wondering if
this is a practical way of going about it. Finding fixable bugs (fixable in
Debian and not by joining the upstream development team) seems to be very
hit-or-miss. Many of the packages with reams of bugs seem to be unfixable
without forking from the upstream version (or simply waiting on upstream to
get around to it.) As you can see from the bugs I've listed, no one
developer would notice that I'm trying to make a contribution by fixing bugs
since each developer only sees a single isolated patch. In fact, on
bugs.debian.org my email address doesn't even show up since I'm not the
submitter of the bugs I'm patching. Finally, you obviously don't need to be
a DD to fix bugs...only to maintain packages it seems (and yes I do plan on
adopting packages I use and have enough skill to maintain as they get
orphaned.)
What would you suggest to overcome this? I'm thinking I should start a
blog listing the various bugs I've worked on. Does Debian have a page that
already does something like this? (A searchable index of changelogs for
instance?)
Thanks in advance
John Lightsey
Reply to: