Programming – How to Start Fixing a Bug

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Although I am not a professional programmer, I have written a program or two. Yet, nowadays every engineer and scientist learns to program a bit as well, and as such I am used to writing programs in Python, C and MATLAB. Now I want to give back a bit to Ubuntu and its great folks and fix a bug!

I had a look at the list of the bitesize campaign and had to find that most of them are not that easy for me to fix as I suspect they require a lot of time to get into the matter, and I do not have that. Still I discovered this one and it looks manageable and like a cool feature to me.

As I have never written a patch or released a program to the wild before though, I have no idea where to start. What should be my first step to tackle that problem?

Bottom line: Where and how do I start fixing that guy?

Best Answer

Answering this question can get long and complicated, so I am instead going to point you to resources available instead of rehashing them here.

Documentation

  1. Getting Set Up for Ubuntu Development
  2. How to Fix Bugs

Tutorials

We run events throughout the cycle to help people just like you, specifically we run Ubuntu Developer Week in IRC, which is a live tutorial and Question and Answer workshop. There's one coming up at the end of February if you want to join in!

Here are two logs from a past session to give you an idea:

Places to Find Opportunities

  • Harvest - this tool goes through all the patches and packages in Launchpad (and even looks in other distros) for patches. Many of these can be snagged, applied, tested, and then fixed in Ubuntu and then sent upstream.
  • Cleansweep - List of patches sitting in Launchpad that someone has attached to a bug report. These could be useful or not, they still should be looked at though.

Getting Help

Contacting the MOTU on the mailing list or IRC is a good way to get help for individual problems you run into:

Feedback

We've spent a lot of time reworking this documentation to be as easy as we can, if you would take notes on your experiences and how we can improve this stuff it would be very useful to know how to make it suck less for people like you.

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