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@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Strange OpCodes: LC: Lobotomize CPU