Serendipity

So I said I'd write some mini-howtos on non-coding ways to get involved with KDE. Kevin Krammer has beaten me to it, and he has some good information and insights.

I don't have time to write a full mini howto, but I have a neat story about bug triage, and how the contributions of non-coders and coders can all come together quite nicely.

It began (for me at least) with flicking through the bug reports, looking for anything I could usefully comment on. I noticed that bug 122218 and bug 122158 looked quite similar, so I added a comment to each bug to say so. Lubos fixed the second bug, and added a comment to the first to note how he'd done it. Enter Ismail Onur Filiz, who, on finding Lubos' explanation of the fix, codes up a patch. It's reviewed and applied, and there's one less bug in KMail :-).

I'm quite pleased with that story, since it shows how non-coding contributions can help things happen, even if they're not directly producing the end result, and it makes me feel that my occasional bug triage attempts are useful.