AdoptPackage

If you would like to concentrate your efforts on one application rather than dividing your attention over all of the different bugs reported against Ubuntu, you should consider adopting a package.

If you've just started with triaging bugs and want help please look at BugSquad/Mentors instead.

IRC Tutorials on Adopt-a-Package - See See the classroom schedule

By adopting a package you take responsibility for keeping the package in good health. This means that you verify old bugs, handle new bugs and forward bugs upstream. Currently a lot of packages aren't being looked after and bugs reported against it are easily forgotten. When you adopt a package your first effort is to make sure all previously reported bugs are properly triaged. This is the hardest part of adopting a package, when that's done you need to make sure the package stays healthy. The QATeam's Package status reports at http://status.qa.ubuntu.com/qapkgstatus/ can be a great help to keep an eye on your bugs. If you've gained some experience and have successfully handled the first stage of adopting a package you could consider adopting another package. However, when you're new it's better to start with one.

How to Adopt a Package

You've decided you want to adopt a package? Great! Now you have to choose what package you would like to take responsibility for. If you're new to triaging it's best to join an existing group with experience. At the bottom of this page you'll find a list of already adopted packages. You could also adopt a package no one is looking after, but make sure you pick a package you can handle or create a team. Please consider adopting one of the packages that need particular care.

There are small packages and large packages in Ubuntu. Some packages have only two bugs reported against them and some two thousand. Those smaller packages can be triaged by one person, but the larger should be adopted by a group of people. We call this group an Adoption Team. This is a group of people who've committed themselves to the adoption of one source package. Because there are so many bugs to triage the triaging process is divided into several tasks; e.g. there are people that just forward bugs upstream, whereas other people process incoming new bug reports.

Now it's time to come into action! The steps below explain how to adopt.

Adopting a previously not adopted package

  1. Pick a package you would like to adopt
    • For Adoption Teams: find a group and document your engagements on a wiki page

  2. Add your name or team to this wiki page
  3. Send a mail to the BugSquad maillist.

  4. Start triaging!

Helping with an already adopted package

  1. Pick a package you would like to adopt
  2. Contact the adopter by mail or in the #ubuntu-bugs IRC channel at FreeNode.

  3. Start triaging!

List of Contacts

If you want to adopt a package but not sure which one yet but you did already choosed an area of speciality please consider in contact a person on the following list, they will help you to determine which one you can adopt.

IRC Nick

Packages/Area of Specialty

Launchpad Username

bdmurrary

Everything

Brian Murray

greg-g

Desktop Apps (esp. GNOME-Do, Tomboy, Evince)

Greg Grossmeier

Joseph Salisbury

Kernel related bugs

Joseph Salisbury

pedro_

Desktop, GNOME related apps

Pedro Villavicencio

yuriy

Desktop, KDE related apps

Yuriy Kozlov

jcastro

Anything involving forwarding bugs and patches upstream. Anything to do with the workflow and how to fix it.

Jorge Castro

hggdh

Bug management, coreutils, generic

hggdh2

saivann

usplash

Saïvann Carignan

zul

Server related packages

Chuck Short

nijaba

Server related packages

Nick Barcet

james_w

Anything that gets a patch attached

James Westby

iulian

irssi, GNOME

Iulian Udrea

cody-somerville

Xubuntu, Process Bugs, and Python

Cody Somerville

sbeattie

Stable Release Updates (SRUs), regressions, AppArmor

Steve Beattie

bencrisford

Edubuntu/Education Applications

Ben Crisford

micahg

Mozilla Apps (Firefox/Thunderbird/Seamonkey, etc...)

Micah Gersten

bcurtiswx

Empathy, Telepathy*

Brian Curtis

simar

Touchpad

Gursimran singh Mohar

COLORS

Assigning packages, confirming, working with reporter

Evan Peck

Packages that should really be adopted

The packages listed here are important parts of the system. When you're looking for an orphan package to adopt, please consider these first.

A way of looking for packages that aren't adopted yet you could search for packages without a Bug Subscriber -- someone who receives all bug mail against the package (s)he's subscribed to. The QATeam maintains a list of all source packages without subscriber at http://qa.ubuntu.com/reports/package/packages-without-subscribers.txt.

Already Adopted Packages

If you decide to help with already adopted packages take a look here. When you adopt a package, please update to list.

Larger Packages

The most complex and the most malformed bug reports are against the larger packages. We call them large because the amount of bugs reported against them is large, but a lot of those packages are also large as in size and complex. Those packages are best adopted by a team of people, a so called Adoption Team. The Adoption Team wiki page gives suggestions for running such a team, but you can always come up with your own structure that scales better, or work on it with an existing team.

Source package

Team wiki-page

gimp

DC LoCO

nautilus

BugSquad/AdoptPackage/Nautilus

The One Hundred Paper Cuts project is being looked after by the papercutters.

Some parts of Ubuntu have their own teams for looking after the bugs. Please contact those teams if you're interested in helping in those areas. A comprehensive list:

Small and Medium Packages

Source package

Adopter(s)

amarok

FreddyMartinez, RjMarsan

amsn

Gianfranco Costamagna

amule

shankao

banshee

Kamus

checkinstall

andreas-noteng

debian-installer

empathy

BCurtisWX

ettercap

Gianfranco Costamagna

firefox

micahg, ddecator

firefox-3.0

micahg

firefox-3.5

micahg

fpc

Paul Gevers

gnome-nettool

MattFischer

gramps

Ross Gammon

GTG

cjohnston

gwibber

Kamus

keep

JonathanJesse

kubuntu-docs

RichardJohnson, JonathanJesse

lazarus

Paul Gevers

lesstif2

Paul Gevers

mypaint

Jon Nordby

nedit

Paul Gevers

network-manager

ChrisBurgan

prism

micahg

rdiff-backup

Andreas Olsson

skype

Gianfranco Costamagna

shotwell

BrunoGirin

thunderbird

micahg

ubiquity

FabioMarconi

ubuntuone-client

duanedesign

unity

om26er

update-manager

Paul Tagliamonte

usb-creator

komputes

vino

JonhWendell

winff

PaulGevers

xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

Gursimran singh Mohar

Glossary

Word

Description

source package

A source package is the uncompiled code, i.e. the code is not translated to the computer's own language: binary. In this form the application was written and in this form it was downloaded from the project's website or version control system. What may seem like different applications in Synpatic can actually come from one source package. So provides the 'nautilus' source not only the 'nautilus' binary package, but also the binary packages 'nautilus-dbg', 'libnautilus-extension1' and 'libnautilus-extension-dev'.

triaging

Triaging is the job of processing new bug reports, assess their effects and pass them on to the developers. It is what the BugSquad does. The wiki page Bugs/HowToTriage explains how to traige and is a good starting point for new triagers.


CategoryBugSquad

BugSquad/AdoptPackage (last edited 2015-05-12 13:41:48 by 131)