Quality Assurance and Bugs
Xubuntu, like any piece of software, needs good testers. You can contribute to Xubuntu simply by running the latest version and reporting bugs and helping follow those bugs until they are fixed.
The first steps in getting involved in Xubuntu QA and bug-tracking include:
- Running the latest development version of Xubuntu, and upgrading regularly.
- Development image CDs are often very under-tested. You can make an important contribution by following the mailing list and reporting bugs and issues that you run into.
- Subscribing to the xubuntu-devel mailing list and reading it. Many developers post testing and experimental packages to the mailing list.
Of course, you will run into problems when you run the testing and development version of Xubuntu. Using the software alone is not a contribution; only when you report the bugs that you encounter do you make a meaningful contribution to the Xubuntu community.
- When you find bugs, you should report bugs into the Xubuntu Launchpad BugTracker. You can make sure your bugs are more useful by carefully reading and following the bug reporting guidelines.
- Look through bugs, especially new bugs, to “triage” them and to find, confirm, and close duplicates. This can also involve verifying and reproducing bugs adding information to the bug description.
- Finally, you can make a huge impact by following up on bugs in packages that you care about and by fixing them!
Reporting Bugs
Software contains flaws, called bugs. To manage them, Xubuntu uses the Launchpad bug tracking system. As an official derivative of Ubuntu, Xubuntu uses the same bugtracking procedures as Ubuntu. The reporting procedure will be the same process, and some of the bugs will even be the same.
Getting Started
To file a bug report, you’ll need to have a launchpad account which you can easily create. You can even use the same OpenID login you use for the Ubuntu wiki.
Filing Bugs
Before submitting a bug, you’ll want to search through the existing bug reports and release notes to verify the bug has not been reported already. If the bug has not already been reported, then you may create a new bug report.
Please do not file a bug report for the following:
- Feature requests
- Development ideas
When filing out the bug report, It is better to have more information than too little – try to be as descriptive as possible. For more information on bug reports and how to file them, please visit the Xubuntu support team on freenode.net #xubuntu.
Conclusion
After you’ve filed a bug report, you’ll most likely find that either a developer or a member of the bugsquad will request more detailed information to help the development team in debugging and correcting the issue. Please cooperate with the requests, as the information requested is needed.
Testing New Versions
Every six months, a new version of Xubuntu is released. To ensure the quality of this new version, it needs to be tested and the results need to be reported. If you have a spare machine, or even a spare partition on your hard drive, we can always use more testing. For more instructions on how to assist with testing the newest, unreleased version of Xubuntu, see the Community Testing page on the Ubuntu wiki. Do note that it is generally not recommended to install an unreleased version of Xubuntu on machines that need to be stable!