A brief look at some distribution news [LWN.net]

By Rebecca Sobol
February 27, 2008

In the process of reading through a number of distribution mailing lists your editor encountered several items that seemed worthy of mention, but none that seemed to provide enough for a complete article. So the following will be a brief look at a variety of topics.

The Fedora Bug Zappers subproject was recently announced on the fedora-devel mailing list. This is a team of people who triage bugs and act as a bridge between the users and developers. The team is meeting regularly, and new bug zappers are always welcome.

Donnie Berkholz ran an informal survey that was answered by 50 Gentoo developers. The results have been graphed, one page per question. For example, the question "What are the top 3 issues facing Gentoo?" is here. "Developers' top 5 issues are manpower, publicity, goals, developer friction, and leadership." The pie chart shown on the previous page has been replaced by a bar chart. There are eight more questions that remain to be charted.

The openSUSE project has been discussing the creation of a developer blog. Although other blogs exist they tend to range off-topic. This would be specifically a place to talk about development topics, such as new features in YaST. Posts would be tagged so that people who wanted to find more about YaST could find all entries with that tag.

Ubuntu wants all users to be involved with bug squashing. Do 5 a day - every day!, says Daniel Holbach.

What you can do? That's up to you, your interests and your abilities.

- If you're a developer, you can help out reviewing patches and getting them uploaded.

- If you want to just confirm new bugs, you can do that.

- If you have experience with a certain package and want to triage bugs you can do that and forward them upstream if necessary.

- If you know your way around Ubuntu quite well, you can help assign bugs to the right package.

That's not a bad idea, regardless of your distribution of choice.

(Log in to post comments)

Ubuntu bug tracking - registration-required and non-free software

Posted Feb 28, 2008 23:10 UTC (Thu) by bignose (subscriber, #40) [Link]

> Ubuntu wants all users to be involved with bug squashing.

If that were true, they would allow access to the bug tracker without requiring registration.
Just as the Debian BTS does.

I'd love to modify their bug tracker to allow this, but they've chosen to keep it non-free
software.

While those two facts remain, Ubuntu is not as interested in community participation for bug
tracking as the above statement would claim.

Ubuntu bug tracking - registration-required and non-free software

Posted Feb 29, 2008 2:01 UTC (Fri) by tseaver (subscriber, #1544) [Link]

The two issues you bring up are separate:

 - anonymous submission of bugreoprts:  I'm not sure that I agree that
   getting anonymous reports actually helps the project, because there
   is no way to ask an anonymous user for further information, or to
   confirm that a given change actually fixed the reported bug.  I know
   that on projects I work on, I triage anonymous reports lower than
   those which come from a "real person".

 - modifying Launchpad:  even if the software were open, you wouldn't
   be able to modify the copy running at launchpad.net without persuading
   the folks running launchpad that your changes were beneficial;  you
   would only be able to set up a separate site running with your patches
   applied.

Ubuntu bug tracking - registration-required and non-free software

Posted Feb 29, 2008 2:20 UTC (Fri) by bignose (subscriber, #40) [Link]

> The two issues you bring up are separate:

Yes, separate but related. That's why I put them in the post as separate paragraphs.

> I'm not sure that I agree that getting anonymous reports actually helps the project

A good thing that's not what I'm advocating then.

I'm pointing out that requiring registration is a significant barrier to the implied goal of
"Ubuntu wants all users to be involved with bug squashing." Removing registration does *not*
mean "getting anonymous bug reports helps the project".

Consider e.g. the Debian bug tracker, which requires no registration, yet has plenty of
communication with bug submitters.

> even if the software were open, you wouldn't be able to modify the copy running at
launchpad.net

Again, that's orthogonal to the point. If the bug tracker program were published free software
(again, like the Debian bug tracker, which is published as the 'debbugs' package), it's at
least *feasible* for an outsider to present a patch that implements a desired change in
behaviour. There's nothing compelling them to implement a given patch, but publishing the tool
as a maintained free software package would at least demonstrate they were open to the
possibility.

By implementing their bug tracker as non-free software, they give the lie to the idea that
they want community involvement in the bug tracking process, because the tools used are an
essential part of that process.