Help Needed! Reviewing and Merging Patches

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Nigel Babu has been working to spread the word about gathering some community steam around patches in Ubuntu. We have an incredibly fortunate situation in Ubuntu where lots of people spend their time and effort producing patches which fix bugs, and they share their gifts with the project to help make Ubuntu better. With so many awesome people sharing patches, we have got behind in reviewing and merging these contributions.

Recently we have spent some time trying to get better visibility on patches in Ubuntu, and you can read all about it here. We now have an awesome patch view so we can see these contributions easier, we now just need to get these wonderful gifts reviewed and merged.

This leads me on to Nigel’s efforts in raising awareness around this effort. He writes:

As of writing this post, there are 1801 bugs with patches attached in Launchpad that are not Fix Released or Fix Committed and do not have branches linked. This tells me 2 things: (1) There are some amazing contributors out there coming up with patches. (2) We have not been clearing up the backlog of bugs with patches attached.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to change this situation by reviewing some of the bugs with patches attached. Well, we need help and everyone are welcome, especially people working towards being an Ubuntu Developer (like me). Patch review needs your help. Right now, we’re focussing on all the bugs that have ubuntu-reviewers team subscribed. This helps us get any potential patch in Lucid.

If you want to help, check out the Code Reviews wiki. When stuck, pop by on #ubuntu-motu channel and mention you’re working on patch review and are stuck, I’m sure someone would be around to help you out.

PS: Hello Planet Ubuntu, my first post after being an Ubuntu Member.

Thanks to Nigel (nigelb on freenode) for being so awesome in focusing on this, and I would love to encourage everyone to get involved. I am sure that if you are stuck where to start, Nigel would be happy to help. This is a great thing to spend the Ubuntu Global Jam doing next week too!

If in doubt, just head in #ubuntu-reviews on freenode IRC and ask there. Also feel free to ask questions in the blog comments here. Let’s rock this thing!