Re: Helping out during Freeze

[Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org>]

Chris wrote:
> Greetings everyone,
>
> I admit, I am still very new to this process.
> If I can, I would be glad to help out during the Freeze process
> if any kind soul would be willing to discuss this off list with me.
>
> Again, I am limited but willing to do and learn.
>   
The best way you can do to help is to send patches to
the debian bug tracking system in order to fix RC (release
critical) bugs. Here's how it work.

Have a look to this page:

http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/

as you can see, there's quite some work to do. Squeeze will only
be released when this graph will reach something close to zero
at least for what concerns the testing distro.

Now, what you should do is read the big list here:

http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/other/testing.html

and search for something that feel comfortable with. Ben said
that it has to be a package that you use, my take is more that
what is important is that you know how to fix.

Once you are done with patching the relevant package, you can
send it as a bug report to the bug tracking system, with the
patch attached. Once there's a patch sent to a bug, it shouldn't
take more than few days for the maintainer to upload the fix.
So watch over the BTS for things you have sent a patch for, then
if the maintainer doesn't do its job after you contacted him, you
can ask a DD to do an NMU (non maintainer upload) with your
fix included, and ask for a testing freeze exception to
debian-release@lists.debian.org.

I hope this helps to help.

Thomas