[Banshee-List] Banshee Bug Buddy, an idea to use our community to increase the quality of bugreports

[David Nielsen <gnomeuser gmail com>]

Hi list,

For some years whenever I have encountered a person complaining about a problem with Banshee I have offered to help file the bug correctly and CC myself to ensure that it isn't forgotten.

This has been rather a remarkable experience, both personally but also for Banshee users. It also doesn't take long, typically the issues are easy to narrow down. All one needs to lend a hand making bugreports better, outside of a little time, is some basic knowledge of how to enable and read debug data from Banshee. As an example of this I have written up an article which should appear on OMGUbuntu.co.uk shortly. It is also my intend to expand outreach efforts by proposing I contribute a "This Week in Banshee" post every week to summerize what has been going on in Banshee.

I would suggest that users interested in being a BBB (Sorry I couldn't find a funny one for BFF) lacking the basic skills read my article when it goes up. There are plenty of references and ideas for how to narrow down a problem. The next step would be to join the #banshee channel on GIMPnet (irc.gimp.org). A lot of users already pop into the channel with problems but don't get any response (or lack the patience to stick around for more than a few minutes). I would like to encourage this realtime resource for people to get help and for us to distribute the workload of narrowing down our bug list.

Another BBB task could be to review our existing buglist to identify likely outdated and invalid bugs, set NEEDINFO with instructions on how to upgrade, retest and collect errors (if needed). This also is very simple and only requires one to spend a bit of time learning to read the output of --debug (and occasionally basic output of --debug-sql). For some retest bugs the requests are general so we can create a set of Wikipages with explanations (I would suggest looking at how Gendarme's rules documentation is organized for the simplicity and clarity we should strive for - together we can do it).

An obvious stumbling block for users with problems is even getting to the correct IRC channel, short term I think a quick guide or an irc client embedded in the website is th way to go. However long term I think we could benefit from looking at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Lernid . I believe such an approach would give us the change to even skip the step of installing an application (afterall it could come with Banshee), it would allow us to tie into the bug system and display relevant information. I suspect the amount of changes required to Lernid to get there would be fairly small.

I have plenty of time the rest of August to work building a community. I don't have any skils to lend to most of the coding tasks, but I have a lot of time on my hands. September and onwards I am moving to Brazil but will continue to be involved, just at different hours. A little less time is likely going to be available for this work by then on account of language classes and naturally spending time with my fiancée, so I hope to have trained a bunch of replacement Davids by then.

For now, I really encourage people to join us on IRC, it is a lot of fun and no problem is to small, no amount of talent should be to small to get through reporting bug.

- David