How does one become a triager?

[Matthew Seaman]

On 28/10/2018 08:54, Lorenzo Salvadore via freebsd-questions wrote:
>>> Hello.
>>
>> Hi.
>>
>>> I saw on bugzilla that some users are FreeBSD triagers. If I understood
>>> correctly, this means that they try to keep the bugs database clean and
>>> easy to use and they ensure that the right labels, keywords, tags etc. are
>>> in the right place.
>>> However, I was unable to find anywhere how does one become a
>>> triager: does this work like for committers as some sort of reward or
>>> is it on volunteer basis?
>>
>> I suppose you are talking about the Bugmeisters:
>>
>> https://www.freebsd.org/administration.html#t-bugmeister
>>
>> So, they are FreeBSD Developers with that task assigned to them.
>>
>>> Thank you.
>>> Lorenzo Salvadore.
>>
>> Best Regards,
>> Alexandre C. Guimarães.
> 
> Thank you very much, indeed I had not understand that the triagers
> and the bugmeisters were the same thing.

There's a bit of a misconception here: people aren't 'assigned' to
bugmeister@ -- they volunteer.  In fact, pretty much everything about
FreeBSD development is done on a purely voluntary basis.  Yes, there are
a few people employed by the FreeBSD Foundation or by various vendors
(to maintain drivers for certain hardware typically) who don't
necessarily just work on what they fancy working on whenever they feel
like it, but they are definitely in the minority.

This means that many FreeBSD developers are doing the work only as their
available free time allows.  Consequently, there's always a backlog of
"stuff that should be done" and a shortage of people stepping up to do
it.  Anyone wanting to become involved in the project will be welcomed
gladly and if they show any consistent tendency to contribute over time,
they will be punished with a commit bit, or (if their contributions are
not so much in the area of writing code) possibly the relatively new
project membership status.

A lot of jobs get taken up by existing developers for the pretty simple
reason that developers tend to go to devsummits where project needs are
discussed, where many other developers get to know them and their
interests and so they are quite likely to get the suggestion that this
is a job they might like to do.  In many cases, there's no intrinsic
requirement for people to be committers in order to do a lot of jobs
around the project, it's just that historically the project has been
much better at recruiting developers than people with talents in other
directions.

So, for the OP, my advice is: talk to people, get to know and become
known around the community.  Contact the bugmeister@ team and ask about
volunteering.  Discuss with them how you might be able to help out, and
then get stuck in.

If you can afford it, go to FreeBSD conferences or other events where
you can meet FreeBSD people face to face -- that makes a big difference.
 There are conferences spread around the world: since the OP is
apparently in Switzerland, perhaps a visit to FOSDEM in Brussels next
February, or EuroBSDCon which will be in Lillehammer, Norway next September.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

	


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