Moderating the bug tracker

This document contains some guidelines for using the Lazarus bug tracker. This document is written for two groups:

• lazarus developers, who will try to fix bugs
• moderators, who will support the handling of issue by priotizing them and making sure that they reproduceable.

We will use the term Lazarus team for both groups.

Life cycle of an issue

An issue can have the following states:

• new: it has entered in the bug tracker
• acknowledged: the Lazarus team has seen the issue and has set its target
• assigned: the issue has been assigned to a lazarus developer, who will try to fix it
• confirmed: a member of the Lazarus team has duplicated the bug or agrees that the feature should be implemented
• resolved: the person to who the issue was assigned thinks the issue can be closed. Then he also sets the resolution, for example fixed or not an issue.

How can moderators support the Lazarus developers

Acknowledging issues

Setting the target

The most important step when you acknowledge an issue, is that you set the target field. The target field helps the lazarus developers to prioritize their bug fixing effort. Generally there are three options: next release, 1.0 or post 1.0. For an explanation of these options, see Road To 1.0#1.0 or after 1.0.

Removing duplicate entries

When looking at new issue, you can also remove duplicated that are caused, because people submitted the same issue more than once. Sometimes the bugtracker takes a long time to process the new report and the reporter gets impatients and clicks on submit again. Those issues can be deleted.

Refering questions to the mailing list and forums

If an issue doesn't describe a bug, but is only question or the reporter doesn't know how to use certain feature, you can refer him to the mailing list and/or the forums to ask his question. Then you can resolve the issue with status not an issue. If you wish you can provide a short answer to the question, but the bug tracker is to enter bugs and feature request, not to provide support.

Confirming issues

Most of the time, the first step in fixing an issue, is creating a small example program that shows the issue. How difficult this is depends on the effort the reporter has made, when he submitted the report. Some people test programs to their report (very nice), some people only a code snippet (better than nothing) and some people nothing at all. Not all reports have adequate steps to reproduce.

If it is not clear from the report, you can ask the reporter the give steps to reproduce this issue and/or a test project.

If you manage to reproduce the issue, then you can set the issue to Confirmed.