Re: (no subject)

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2001 at 10:41:33PM +0200 or thereabouts, riviere wrote:
> hi
> I'm laura from paris and I wish to help. what should I do ?

Hooray!

I realised looking through the archives that there were no replies
on-list. Did people reply privately? I hope I'm not the first to 
reply, but I think you may have subscribed and emailed this before 
everyone else arrived!

Okay, some suggestions. 

Make a bugzilla account at http://bugzilla.gnome.org.

You -will- need cookies enabled for bugzilla stuff, or it will ask you
for your password every single time you load a new page. You also
probably need netscape, mozilla or galeon. I have tried to use 
bugzilla with text-only browsers, but it can be painful. 

Some people have had trouble with repeated "please give name and 
password" requests on bugzilla. This seems to be related to proxies:
or at least that's the only guess we have so far. (Red Hat bugzilla
gets confused about this too, but emptying the cookie jar often 
fixes things there, which doesn't seem to have helped the people
who had this trouble with bugzilla.gnome.org.)

Pick a product or component you know or like -- or want to learn
about :) Components in gnome-games are terribly popular, for some
reason...

Go through the bugs in it and see whether they still exist on whatever
version of Gnome you have. Add comments saying whether you can reproduce
it and what version you have of Gnome. It can help a lot to know whether
something is broken or fixed on different distros. (For example, I had
one app which consistently crashed on RH and worked fine on Debian.)
It really helps to have gnome-1.4 for this, but 1.2 can do to verify 
that the bug is repeatable at least.

If you find lots that look exactly the same, either get someone else
to mark them all as duplicates, or email bugmaster gnome org with the
name of your bugzilla account asking for some extra bugzilla powers
so you can mark things as duplicates and so on. 

If you can't find good instructions on how to repeat, that's fine.
Press on until you find some that are better. There are -lots- of
very brief reports in there which are impossible to deal with. (We're
marking those as NEEDINFO and asking for "what did you do before
this happened?" at the moment.)

This can take a while, by the way. I have no idea how Greg Leblanc,
John Fleck and Kjarten Maraas have been whizzing through hundreds of
them in a day. Don't panic if it takes a lot longer than that. Bugzilla
is complicated and it takes a while to get used to it. 

Oh yes. If you're from Paris, do feel free to translate into English 
any of the reports in French that are in there :) Babelfish is a little
weird at times!

I tend to do a query whilst logged in: all "new or unconfirmed bugs
in product gnome-core and component general", for example. And then
instead of hitting "run this query", I hit "give this query a name
and save it". Then I reload that query and run it, and I can run the
same thing the next day, or the next week, or whatever without having
to fill in a ton of fields. Just the "run query called foo" field. 

There is a #bugs channel on irc.gnome.org. It can be very very quiet
because there's only once been as many as seven people on it, and
mostly there's three or four. But anyone there will say hello, and
help out. 

Wow, that was long. I hope you haven't given us up because of the
delay. I think you were too fast, and no-one else was subscribed
when you asked this question. (I found it when I read the archives.)

Telsa