KDE team needs buq-squashers, organizers

– By Tina Gasperson –
The KDE desktop development team has a mess of bugs on its hands. There are thousands of open bug reports and feature requests, and not enough people to go through them.The problem is that there’s only a few people in charge of the bug reports, and bug reporters have a tendency to throw the complaints into the wrong “pile” — or to report bugs that don’t even belong to KDE at all. KDE developer Stephen Kulow posted his lament to the kde-devel discussion list: “We urgently need at least three or four people cleaning up that mess for us.”

Bugs also need to be tested by attempting to reproduce their effects on the current CVS. But evidently, this is not a fail-proof method because many times the bug happens on the user’s system but not on the bug-tester’s system.

“My problem usually is, ‘well, it works for me, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there for you,’ ” writes bug-tester Rob Kaper. In this case, the tester usually adds a note to the bug report stating that the bug didn’t reproduce for him. Kulow says that “if the [bug] reporter doesn’t give a way to reproduce it, I close the bug.” With more bug testers, the “malfunctioning” bug could be passed to others to test before being deleted.

If you’re interested in getting involved with the KDE development project as a bug-squasher, or in any other way, a good way to start is to subscribe to a mailing list. KDE has dozens of lists devoted to many aspects of the project. The list of lists is at master.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/.