On the subject of Mantis and who does what with it:

It's great when someone takes the time to report a problem and still  
better when they include a decent amount of information about the  
problem, how it happened, what image, what machine, what VM, update  
level etc. Reading  http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/ 
bugs.html is a useful way to spend a moment.

What happens next is..... nothing much, usually. This is a tragedy.  
All that information waiting to be used to improve our world. Sigh.

So what are you going to do about it? Yes *you*, stop squirming and  
sit up straight, pay attention and resolve to take your part properly  
in this process. The simple fact is that for complex problems there  
are only a few people with the experience to have much likelihood of  
success and most of them are very busy. Anything that can be done to  
save time will improve the chance of a complex problem getting  
tackled and *that* can be done by almost any of us. In the process of  
the simple jobs I am about to suggest we are going to learn and  
eventually become expert enough to tackle bigger works, maybe.

Job 1: making sure the report makes sense
Just about anyone (even me on a monday morning pre-caffeine) can  
check a random report, see if it has even faintly enough information  
to mean anything and decide if it has a hope of being useful. If data  
is lacking, try contacting the original reporter to see if they can  
offer more grist for the mill. If they can't, or won't, or say they  
can reproduce it then we can only sensibly close the report. If you  
can find related seeming reports using the mantis search facility,  
link them together.

Job 2: making sure it's reproducible
Just about anyone (blah blah) can try to reproduce a problem. If  
there seems to insufficient information to be able to, see Job 1.  
Assuming you can reproduce the problem you can add your experience to  
the report. If it took some time to get to the problem, consider  
saving an image/changes/ script for future reference.

Job 3: assign it to someone plausible
A lot of the time it is quickly obvious where the problem lies and  
you can assign the report to the right people. If you don't know the  
right assignee, change the report status to feedback and assign it to  
your best guess.  It's not like you're ordering the person to do work.
What we could do with in the Mantis setup is a more useful list of  
assignable names; I'd really prefer to see 'VM guys', 'Collections  
folks', 'Windows weenie' than 'fred', 'jkr' etc. Roles are better  
than names for this purpose.

The nice thing is that you don't have to do all three of these. If  
you are a real newcomer with an urge to help, just do a bunch of Job  
1. If you can achieve a report that makes sense to you as a newcomer  
then it ought to be really clear to someone more experienced. If you  
can't make time to test stuff but know a good bit about what goes  
where and who deals with it, do a bunch of Job 3.

Right now there's only 289 reports listed on the Squeak mantis board.  
If everyone that was eligible to vote in the recent board elections  
(340-something?) took a look at doing one of the above jobs per day -  
forget about actually working on the bug in detail - then within a  
week we could have every report checked on by several sets of eyes.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: LC: Lobotomize CPU