Helping with Bugs

It is common knowledge that Ubuntu gets hundreds of Bug Reports daily. And currently, we have around 32K Open Bugs.


http://people.ubuntu.com/~brian/graphs/
http://people.ubuntu.com/~brian/testing_graphs/

This is an invite to everyone fond of Ubuntu. Bug Reporting's one thing, but Triaging's another. Once a bug gets reported, it stays there. The Dev/Maintainer would be informed that he has an Open bug, and he may or may not choose to work on it. Sometimes, due to stress and workload, they don't even have the luxury of time to look at your report.

This is where Bug Triaging comes in. We mark duplicate bugs, ask for confirmation from users, and squeeze as much information from both users and reporters. Once we have everything we need, we mark it as Triaged and set the appropriate Priority. The dev/maintainer, no matter how busy he is, is now obligated to look into it. Fix it or replace the affected package with an updated one.

Of course, there will always be old bugs. Sometimes, we have Open Bugs as far back as 2005, and there's nothing we can do but close it and advise users to upgrade to the latest stable version.

This is how we control bugs. Join us, I know you'll have fun doing this.

Additional Resources:
Contribute to Ubuntu
BugSquad
Bug Responses
Bug Importance
How to Report Bugs
Effective Bug Reporting
Finding the Right Package
Getting Backtrace
Debugging Procedures

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