Contents
First things first
All help is welcome, we lack people power to handle bug reports so don't hesitate to try a few things written here. You'll see it's rewarding to tweak bugs.
First you have to get to know the BTS. You can also read how to use the BTS.
Bug reports are designed to help the maintainer to have a better package.
Finding information
You can find informations about a package on the tracker like
the maintainer's DDPO,
- the history of the upload,
- the homepage of upstream,
a link to Salsa (VCS),
a link to ubuntu's launchpad and much more.
Team maintained projects have specific informations and resources. You can use these as resources when you are triaging bugs.
- some times they have a policy.
- They often have a mailing list for the team.
- If they have an IRC channel you may well find other users around at the same time that you can enlist to try to reproduce a bug you're having trouble reproducing or other people to advise you on issues with bugs.
- Upstream normally have their own resources.
- a homepage
- a mailing list for their software
- a bug tracker
- and they may have an IRC channel too. Again an IRC channel might be useful to find people who can help you to reproduce or rule out bugs.
- Search engines can some times be useful resources in tracking down if other distributions or people have seen the same bug. You can also find informations on their bug trackers
Different ways to work on bug reports
Browse bug reports
Read HowtoUseBTS#QueryingBugReports. You can also use UDD Bugs search to select bugs corresponding to your criteria.
Report bugs
So learn to reportbug and read HowtoUseBTS#ReportingBugReports.
Bug Triaging
You have many possibilities with BugTriage.
CategoryBugs | CategoryRedundant: merge with BTS and other pages