BugSquad/Bug Report

How to file a ticket

If you're using Sugar on a Stick and find something specific you think could be improved - maybe something isn't working the way you think it should work, or you have an idea for how something could be better - you can file a ticket. A ticket is a way to suggest to the developers that they should work on something.

Log into Trac

The first thing you'll have to do is log into our ticket system. This is a piece of software that keeps track of all our tickets for us. There are many different types of ticket systems; we use Trac. Our instance of Trac is at http://dev.sugarlabs.org - go ahead and click that link.

You'll see a webpage with this menu in the top right corner.

If you don't have an account yet, click Register and create one. If you do have an account, click Login and sign in to your account.

Create a new ticket

Once you log in, the menu on the top right will look like this:

There'll be a button called New Ticket - click it.

Categorize the ticket

Now that you've finished writing your ticket, it's time to categorize it so that it gets to the right people when you file it. We'll walk through each of the important categorizations in turn.

There are two types of tickets: defects and enhancements. Defects are things you think are broken. If you can't get something to work, that's a defect. Enhancements are ideas on how to make something that isn't broken better - maybe you have an idea for a new feature that will let you do things that you can't do with the software right now.

Tickets also specify components. This tells us which part of the software we should look at, and who might want to look at it. For instance, if we were working on a bicycle, you might report a bug in the "handlebar" component - that way, we know to just look at the handlebar when we're fixing things, and the people who only want to work on tires know they don't have to worry about that problem.

Finally, there's the distribution. For Sugar on a Stick, the distribution is Fedora. You can learn more about what Linux distributions are on Wikipedia, but this probably isn't the most important information to know - it's just extra information that can help developers figure out what's going on.