On Sun, Mar 28, 1999 at 02:46:59PM -0600, Jeff Licquia wrote:
> > Now that several new maintainers mentioned QA or QA-like work in their
> > new-maintainers application I'd like to invite people to work on QA
> > for Debian. This doesn't need a fully fledged developer but also
> > people who can only spend a few hours on Debian.
> I didn't mention QA in my new maintainer application, but I'd like to
> volunteer (as soon as it comes back).
> How does one get started? Just subscribing to debian-qa?
Depends on what you're good at, really.
If you're into coding, have a look through some of the older bug reports,
and see if there's something you can fix. If there is, download the package,
check the bug still exists, then download the source, and see if you can
track it down. There are still lots of bugs out there that are relatively
easy to fix if you're a fairly good programmer.
If you're into documentation, there are heaps of packages that could do
with some extra manpages written. Have a look through the lintian bug
reports for missing manpages, or the normal bug reports for the same, or
links to undocumented.7 on your system, or so on. Hmmm. netbase could
use some manpages written, if you're in the mood... :)
If you're into fixing packaging mistakes, have a look through the
lintian bug reports, download the source for some of the packages with
errors that look fixable and fix them. Send a patch to the maintainer,
with suitable explanations of what changes fixed what problems. Sometimes
running cruft will give you pointers to files left by packages that don't
clean up after themselves when you --purge them. I tend to get lots of
complaints from man(1) about broken symlinks and stuff. Both are good
places to find things to fix.
Some good places to start are fixing really old bugs [0] and fixing bugs
in the base system. I quite like browsing through obscure wishlist bugs,
there's occasionally some gems in there that are entertaining to fix.
If you don't have time to do lots of stuff, just choose one bug, and
try to fix it in a week or so. Whatever. Any help's better than none,
after all. [1]
Cheers,
aj
[0] http://master.debian.org/~ajt/oldbugs.txt , as mentioned earlier.
If you're adopting one of these bugs to fix it, or you've got some
more details to add to the description on the page, please mail me
with a note to add to it.
[1] Especially considering http://master.debian.org/~ajt/graph.png .
*sigh*
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.
``Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking
for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.''
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