New
This is a work in progress, feel free to edit both this and the current document, the idea of this one is to overhaul the entire document to produce a page that is friendly for new triagers to read and also for more experienced guys to get to the best bits.
Welcome
Welcome to the highly frustrating yet satisfying world of Bug Triage for Mozilla based software. Before we go on, I would like to warn you about some of the dangers involved, many of Mozilla's applications are very large and often confusing, when you throw in a Flash Player, a Java Plug-in, and a couple of extensions, it just gets worse. Remember that help is always at hand when you need it, please just ask!
We oversee:
- Firefox, the main web browser.
- Thunderbird, an email client to replace Evolution.
also we deal with the associated plug-ins and extensions, so we have an unenviable task when it comes to fixing these issues.
Administration
Here are a couple of long term goals for Firefox triage.
- Every 'unconfirmed' issue report should be acknowledged with in a few hours. In many cases a Firefox crash report is the first bug report that a new users files. Let's make it a positive experience.
- Issue reports that have been sitting as 'need info' should be closed or followed up on after 30 days.
- All 'confirmed' bugs should be classified as Ubuntu, Debian, or Mozilla based on where in the packaging processing they first appear. Debian and Mozilla issues should be pushed upstream as soon as possible. Ubuntu issues should be taken care of by an Ubuntu Developer
Versions
At any given point in time we are maintaining 3 versions of a package. The Long Term Support Release; Dapper, the current version; Edgy and the developmental version; Feisty. We triage bugs relating to versions from the official Ubuntu repositories. If someone reports a bug from a third party repository, please politely refer them back to the repository maintainer for support.
Long Term Support - We will fix all issues that have been rated High by The QA Team and we will work with upstream and/or other teams to produce work a rounds for other issues if needed.
Current - Same as LTS.
Developmental - We will attempt to fix all issues.
Triage Process
Please see MozillaTeam/Bugs/Triage/Process for more information.
Prepared Responses
As a triager you will often be asking the same types of questions. I have compiled a list of my frequently asked question at MozillaTeam/Bugs/Triage/Responses. It works pretty well to copy the generic responses to a Tomboy note and tweak them to better fit you personal style. Always try to include the reporters name and a personal sentence to each response. I like to click on the reporters name and check out their karma to get a feel from their experience with bug reporting.
Upstream
Please see MozillaTeam/Bugs/Triage/Upstream for more information.
Common Issues
As a triager, you will begin to see a number of re-occurring issues.
User Interaction
MozillaTeam/Bugs contains step-by-step instructions for bug reporters to provide us with helpful bug reports.
Crashes
New to the Edgy development Cycle is the apport crash reporting infrastructure. This infrastructure is currently undergoing rapid development so hold on tight. We'll talk in more detail about crash report later on. For now, let's just consider that most Firefox crashes are actually Flash, Java, or plugin related. Please realize crash reports are not always bug reports.
Mozilla Gtk Consistency
Firefox is written to be cross platform. The Mozilla developers have developed their own widget set to aid in this cross compatibility. Widgets are all the dialogs where Firefox communicates with the rest of the operating system. Such as file pickers, file save, set proxy.... For consistency with the rest of Ubuntu, these widgets have often been replaced with Gtk widgets by Debian and Ubuntu Developers.
Localization
Upstream Firefox is officially available in over 45 languages. That is a lot of different fonts and localized Ubuntu help pages to keep straight.
Branding
Upstream, Mozilla is struggling with how to protect the Firefox brand while being as flexible as possible to downstream distributions. This causes changing icon and product naming requirements.
MozillaTeam/Bugs/Triage/New (last edited 2008-08-06 17:01:17 by localhost)