12.04 Life of a bug

On Wednesday 18th Jan 2012 I was having problems with my updated test image of 12.04. It installed well and the bug that was affecting the selection of the language appeared to have been squashed (That bug lived a short life, it’s history can be found at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gtk+3.0/+bug/911905 ) But, more worryingly, when I started the new install my Virtual Machine went ‘crazy’… Screen kept resizing and eventually it just fizzled out and hung. As there was the weekly QA (Quality Assurance / Testing) meeting scheduled for 5pm (UTC) [1] I asked about it on there when we got to the agenda item for Lubuntu. Fairly quickly one of the other QA team had verified the problem and more importantly had gotten a error message. Things move on quite quickly when we have a critical bug that prevents the install from working. The daily builds for lubuntu are generated at about 5:30pm UTC, so after the meeting myself and njin both updated our install images and tried again. At about 5 minutes to 8pm when the weekly Lubuntu meeting [2] takes place we both confirmed said bug was still present. At about 8:15pm I was asked to give my report to lubuntu team about QA, I presented what was pretty much breaking news along with what information we had. The meeting progressed and finished. Immediately after the meeting our head of development (Julien) had a dig into what was going on and raised a bug report ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gtk+3.0/+bug/911905 ). Within  5 hours the cause was found as is being chased. I’ll give an update once I have some more news.

For those of you whos interest in the importance of testing has been hightened, may I point you to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Lubuntu/GettingInvolved where you will find how to contribute and the list of the various Sub Teams, including the QA one for lubuntu.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam

[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Lubuntu/GettingInvolved#Meetings