I want to fix a bug. Where do I start?

Posted by Ingo Gerth on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Ingo Gerth
Published on 2011-01-28T15:28:53Z Indexed on 2011/01/29 7:33 UTC
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programming

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bug

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contributing

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bitesize

Although I am not a professional programmer, I have written a program or two. Yet, nowadays every engineer and scientist learns to program a bit as well, and as such I am used to writing programs in Python, C and MATLAB. Now I want to give back a bit to Ubuntu and its great folks and fix a bug!

I had a look at the list of the bitesize campaign and had to find that most of them are not that easy for me to fix as I suspect they require a lot of time to get into the matter, and I do not have that. Still I discovered this one and it looks manageable and like a cool feature to me.

As I have never written a patch or released a program to the wild before though, I have no idea where to start. What should be my first step to tackle that problem?

Bottom line: Where and how do I start fixing that guy?

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