What is 5-A-Day?

Put simply, 5-a-day is a great approach to making our list of bugs more manageable by sharing the workload. This is inspired by the philosophy that eating 5 portions of fruit/vegetables keeps you healthy...well, working on 5 bugs a day keeps Ubuntu healthy.

So the idea is simple - let's get every Ubuntu enthusiast working on 5 bugs a day - everyone can take part, no matter whether you are a developer or not. Let's work together and make some real progress!

...and, to make it fun, we have produced some tools and rankings to make those 5 bugs count. Making Ubuntu better and having fun...we like it.

So what kind of things can you do as part of your 5-a-day?

If you have never done any development:

• If you want to just confirm new bugs, you can do that.
• Find bugs in upstream bug trackers and link them to the Ubuntu bugs in Launchpad.

If you are a developer:

• Review patches and get them uploaded.
• If you've 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.

What you need to do to participate?

• If you haven't helped out with bugs before you might want to take a look at Bugs/HowToTriage or ask the nice people on #ubuntu-bugs on irc.freenode.net.

• Print out the 5-a-day Playbook to hand out to participants. 5-a-day.pdf

Automatic Reporting

1. Join the 5-A-Day Participants team!

   • your e-mail address must not be hidden from other Launchpad users for you to receive credit

2. Done! Check out http://reports.qa.ubuntu.com/reports/five-a-day/ to see how you're doing.

If you plan to host a Bug Jam, or participate in the Global Bug Jam, add your event to the Bug Jam section of Bugs/Events.

Getting Started

A great way to begin is to look over bugs you have reported before and get them into shape. Have you reported a bug on a previous release of Ubuntu before?

• Is it the best quality bug report it could be?
• Could it use a better summary or a test case?
• Do you know if the bug still occurs in the development release?

You can review the bugs you've reported at https://bugs.launchpad.net/people/+me/+reportedbugs . You should be comfortable with the bugs you've reported in the past; pay particular attention to how more experienced triagers handled your bugs.

Not a developer?

Once you feel comfortable to start triaging, the following lists may be a helpful starting point:

• Bugs reported using the "Help -> Report a Problem" contain detailed information regarding the system the bug was reported on therefore they can be easier to triage. They are all tagged 'apport-bug' and you can find ones with a status of "New" at New apport-bugs.

• Bug reports that were submitted yesterday with a high bug gravity - http://qa.ubuntu.com/reports/bugnumbers/yesterday.html

• Reviewing bugs marked for expiration - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+expirable-bugs

• Bugs that need forwarding to the Upstream bugtrackers (Instructions) - since a majority of bugs from users are of software that is developed by upstreams it is important that bug linkages are as complete as possible.

• Unlinked upstream bugs - Sometimes people add a link to an upstream bug tracker in the comments of a bug but don't bother creating an upstream task. This is a list of possible targets that can be linked. (Lots of low hanging fruit in this list, but also a bunch of dupes and ones inappropriate to be linked.)

• Bugs without a package - Sometimes users do not know which package a bug is in, so they leave it blank - assigning a package to a bug will help move it along to the next step.

• Check out bugs that were not taken care of during Bug Days.

You're a developer?

You might be interested in the following lists of bugs:

• Reviewing the list of patches on Ubuntu bugs
  1. Make sure the bug is still relevant.
  2. Assign it to you.

  3. Transform the patch into a debdiff if necessary.

  4. Make sure it builds and fixes the bug.

  5. Add it to the sponsoring queue or upload it yourself.

• The Kernel:

  • http://people.ubuntu.com/~ogasawara/hardy-buglist.html - It's an excellent starting place for the community to get involved and work with the Ubuntu kernel team.

• It is unfortunately the case that new bug reports will sometimes go unanswered. This is actively being addressed, but we can always use additional help. The following are lists of bug reports in older Ubuntu releases:

  • Kernel bugs tagged under lucid

    1. If the report has not had any recent activity, it would be helpful to know if the issue reported still exists or not.
    2. Additionaly, if the issue still exists, it would be useful to know if it is still present in the actively developed kernel.

* If you're interested on GUI applications you may want to take a look to:

• Product	Debugging Instructions
  UpdateManager	DebuggingUpdateManager
  Compiz	DebuggingCompiz

CategoryBugSquad