On 8/20/22 4:28 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote: > Chuck Zmudzinski [2022-08-20 16:20:21] wrote: > > That's a fair point. It may not be so easy for me to work on a bug that > > does not affect > > my systems, but I am willing to help with bugs important to the Debian > > project now, as > > the bookworm development process continues. I will take some time and see > > if I can > > help out with some other open bugs that do not directly affect my systems. > > Such bugs > > can be found by querying BTS for bugs marked as critical or grave by the > > maintainer > > and bugs that are blocking a release, as these are the ones most important > > to the > > maintainers and developers. I don't know if I have the skills to fix such > > bugs which are > > probably not so easy to fix, but it wouldn't hurt to ask if there is > > anything I can do to > > help. One thing that is always helpful are testers to test the proposed > > fixes for open > > bugs, and I could help with that in cases when the bug affects a package on > > one or more > > of my systems, at least to tell the maintainer, "that proposed fix looks > > good, it does not > > break anything on my systems." > > Yes, there are many things one can do to help. E.g. several bugs are > misfiled (for example, sent to the Debian maintainer instead of being > sent to the package's developer even though the bug is unrelated to the > Debian packaging itself). Or often the bug report lacks information to > reproduce it. > > > Stefan >
On Debian, the best thing users can do to help, AFAICT, is to run the testing distribution on non-critical systems to see if the development of the next stable Debian version is causing problems. The more people who run testing and give the developers feedback about problems on BTS, the more likely the stable version won't break someone's current setup when it is released and users start upgrading to the new stable version in larger numbers. Still, for this development process that Debian uses to be effective, when problems are reported to BTS, the developers and maintainers need to respond to the bugs that are reported and not ignore them. Best regards, Chuck
