I want to fix a bug. Where do I start?

Posted by Ingo Gerth on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Ingo Gerth
Published on 2011-01-28T15:28:53Z Indexed on 2011/01/29 7:33 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 245

Filed under:

programming

|

bug

|

contributing

|

bitesize

Although I am not a professional programmer, I have written a program or two. Yet, nowadays every engineer and scientist learns to program a bit as well, and as such I am used to writing programs in Python, C and MATLAB. Now I want to give back a bit to Ubuntu and its great folks and fix a bug!

I had a look at the list of the bitesize campaign and had to find that most of them are not that easy for me to fix as I suspect they require a lot of time to get into the matter, and I do not have that. Still I discovered this one and it looks manageable and like a cool feature to me.

As I have never written a patch or released a program to the wild before though, I have no idea where to start. What should be my first step to tackle that problem?

Bottom line: Where and how do I start fixing that guy?

© Ask Ubuntu or respective owner

Related posts about programming

Imperative Programming v/s Declarative Programming v/s Functional Programming

as seen on Geeks with Blogs - Search for 'Geeks with Blogs'
Imperative Programming :: Imperative programming is a programming paradigm that describes computation in terms of statements that change a program state. In much the same way as the imperative mood in natural languages expresses commands to take action, imperative programs define sequences of commands… >>> More
Programming in python Vs programming in Java

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I've been writing Java for the last couple of years , and now I've started to write in python (in addition). The problem is that when I look at my Python code it looks like someone tried to hammer Java code into a python format , and it comes out crappy because - well , python ain't Java. Any… >>> More
Have you ever bought a commercial implementation of a programming language for personal programming

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Commercial products are often a source of ideas and inspiration for open source projects. There are free and open source implementations of almost every programming language ever devised, and a lot of them are very good. For non-work related personal programming projects, have you ever bought an… >>> More
Is Game Programming very different from normal programming?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
By normal programming, I'm referring to application programming (which is all I'm familiar with at the moment). My goal is to make games, and I wanted to know if the path was different than other programming paths at the beginner level. Or perhaps it's too early for me to worry about that at this… >>> More
Programming activities for high school kids who have no idea what CS or programming is

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I work at a small high school that's in a very high poverty area. There are only a handful of seniors that are thinking about applying to be an engineer of some sort in college and only 1 kid that applied for Computer Science (he has a couple acceptances so far!). He's been talking to me a lot as… >>> More

Related posts about bug

MySQL Connector/Net 6.5.5 Maintenance Release has been released

as seen on Oracle Blogs - Search for 'Oracle Blogs'
MySQL Connector/Net 6.5.5, a new maintenance release of our 6.5 series, has been released. This release is GA quality and is appropriate for use in production environments. Please note that 6.6 is our latest driver series and is the recommended product for development. It is now… >>> More
MySQL Connector/Net 6.4.6 Maintenance Release has been released

as seen on Oracle Blogs - Search for 'Oracle Blogs'
MySQL Connector/Net 6.4.6, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released. This is a maintenance release and is recommended for use in production environments. It is appropriate for use with MySQL server versions 5.0-5.6. This is intended to be the final release… >>> More
Minty Bug: Build an FM Bug Inside a Mint Container

as seen on How to geek - Search for 'How to geek'
Electronics projects that have real world (and showing off to your friends) potential are the most fun; today we take a look at a clever FM bug design hidden in a mint container. At PyroElectro Projects they wanted to try something new with the whole electronics-in-mint-container genre. They opted… >>> More
Bug Triage

as seen on Daniel Moth - Search for 'Daniel Moth'
In this blog post brain dump, I'll attempt to describe the process my team tries to follow when dealing with new bug reports (specifically, code defect reports). This is not official Microsoft policy, just the way we do things… if you do things differently and want to share, you can do so at the bottom… >>> More
IE Display Bug, jQuery bug

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
So I built some complex ajaxy jquery module on my homepage, with the help of "scrollable" from flowplayer.org. It works fine for me on Chrome, Opera, Firefox ... but of course IE is not playing friendly (regardless of the version, from my testing). Objects are not displaying exactly where they should… >>> More