Heya all,

Have you been enjoying Inkscape and wondering about an easy way to contribute back? Bug triaging may be for you!

Bug triaging is basically our first line step in the process of handling bugs. It's like being the host in a restaraunt - you don't fix the bugs, you just make sure the reporter has been greeted and find where they should sit.

You can see the problem we're trying to solve by just looking at this plot:

http://people.ubuntu.com/~brian/project-graphs/inkscape/plots/inkscape-month...

Or, this one is less intimidating since it shows the progress we'd made prior to the release:

http://people.ubuntu.com/~brian/project-graphs/inkscape/plots/inkscape-halfy...

(There is a friendly navigation web thingee here: http://people.ubuntu.com/~bryce/Plots/)

The job is to keep our total # of New bugs at as close to 0 as possible. We're up towards 200 now, so there's a bit of work to get caught up on, but once that's caught up you can see that there's a rate of about 3 new bugs/day.

Triaging is pretty easy; anyone can do it - you just need to sign up for a launchpad bug account. (For extra triaging powers you can also join the Inkscape bug team.) Then you read each bug report that comes in, and make sure it has all the necessary information for developers to troubleshoot it.

So for example, this may include asking people to include screenshots, steps to reproduce the issue, backtraces, and/or example files; then you set it to Incomplete state.

Then, you also review bugs that are in 'Incomplete with response' and check if they've included the needed info, and move them into Completed state. You can see the bugs still in Incomplete state via the Plots link above.

And that's pretty much it. If you are looking for a way to contribute some help to Inkscape that doesn't require an extensive time commitment, this is one of the easiest ways to make a difference. Plus it's addictive! You can track your "karma score" at this link:

https://launchpad.net/inkscape/+topcontributors

Getting yourself up into the top 5 is a good challenge if you have the interest and time to put into it. Karma degrades over time, so even if you're starting from 0 you have a chance to catch up and pass the long timers!

Bryce