Michael Stapelberg’s Debian Blog

RC bugs (2012-11-25)

I recently worked on the following RC bugs:

I have to say that I find the BTS to be very hard to read from the perspective of a newcomer who wants to help squashing RC bugs, both from a technical and a social standpoint.

As an example for the technical side: blocking bugs are very easy to miss, so innocent bugreports which seem actionable turn out to just wait for another bug with lots of discussion. Also, it seems like the best interface to the BTS for RC bugs is UDD, so RichiH’s RC report was quite helpful.

For the social side: Bugreports often are in a state in which it is not clear what the next course of action is, e.g. #634261 (the bug is not considered RC, but still has severity: grave) or #684633 (dropping from testing suggested but not clear whether a removal request has been filed or not).

I’m aware that this is very vague critic. I suppose what I am missing is a way in which we can make the list of RC bugs more actionable. When I am browsing through RC bugs, I often open bugreports and figure out that there’s nothing I can do. Possibly a way to improve this situation is by letting people claim ownership of a bug and then filtering for un-owned bugs and those which have an owner but have not seen any activity for some period of time.