Reviewing bugs

[SaranjeetKaur]

This chapter describes how you can contribute to R by reviewing bug reports.

[willingc]

Looking good ☀️ I've made a few wording suggestions.

[llrs]

Great work! I really liked the introduction to this.

If someone is following the book and using it and reproduces a bug should they post it on Bugzilla that they could reproduce it or not?

I am a bit lost there if I had to provide one for a bug I opened. Perhaps on classifying bug reports I would provide more help on how or where to write a unit test.

[SaranjeetKaur]

Hi @llrs ! Yes, to make things clearer, I am looking for examples where people have acted as reviewers previously on BugZilla. A few examples are collected. More explanation will be provided in this chapter by taking inspiration from those examples. Hope this exercise will increase the clarity of the process.

[hturner]

This is looking good for a first draft Saranjeet. I think we might be able to add more/link to relevant sections when you get to the part about unit tests, to give more guidance on that point.

[hturner]

Regarding @llrs's comment her

If someone is following the book and using it and reproduces a bug should they post it on Bugzilla that they could reproduce it or not?

I think there are two situations this might be useful:

1. You can provide a far simpler and clearer example to reproduce the issue and/or you needed to do something different from what the original poster said to reproduce the bug (e.g. you needed to load another package to run their code).
2. A long time has passed without resolution or recent comment, then saying it is still an issue in the current (ideally R-devel) version can be worth saying to bump the issue.

Otherwise, I would say that reproducing the issue should not be shared on Bugzilla, but might be a starting point for working on a fix or a unit test.

[willingc]

Great to see this merged. Go @SaranjeetKaur.