Ubuntu – How to best retest a bug in a newer or development release

This guide should help you narrow down the right package. For bug triaging help find someone in the Bug Squad or ask on their mailing list or in #ubuntu-bugs.

The bugsquad has regular meetings and can probably find you a mentor if you want to help (and join!). For reference here's the Bug Triaging Guide.

This is not about the particular bugs you've filed, but general good practice for getting bugs dealt with in a timely manner:

• Make sure you've filed the bug report in the correct source package. Bug triagers and developers tend to be subscribed to the bug mail of packages they're interested in or responsible from, so for the relevant people to look into your bug in a timely manner, it needs to be filed with a package specified, and the correct one. If you have trouble determining what the right package is, this wiki page may help.

• Make sure your bug contains relevant debugging information. In most cases, filing your report using ubuntu-bug will ensure this, but there's a wealth of information on debugging procedures on the wiki that will also come in handy.

• If your report looks all fine, but there's no response for a long time, try announcing it on #ubuntu-bugs on Freenode by citing the bug number to see if any bug triagers around can push it in the right direction. Remember that most triagers and developers are volunteers with constrained time and energy, and being too assertive can discourage people from helping you. If nobody around seems to be able to help, try another time of the day.

• If you know the particular people whom you think should be looking into your bug, give them a ping on IRC (you can see people's IRC nicknames in their Launchpad profiles), or subscribe them to the bug explaining why you subscribed them with a polite and concise comment immediately afterwards. Don't assign them; just subscribe them, don't subscribe teams unless specifically instructed to do so, and don't mass-subscribe anyone to multiple bugs at the same time.