Fedora 11 Common Bugs page

So, this week I've got to do something I'm pretty familiar with!

We've been working on the Fedora 11 Common Bugs page. In my Mandriva days, I worked a lot on the same page, which is known as Errata in the Mandriva universe. Here is my magnum opus - take that, Dan Brown. The Fedora 11 page hasn't hit such heroic lengths yet, and hopefully won't :)

So, we want everyone involved in Fedora to take the Common Bugs page to heart. Why should you do this? Here's Several Awesome Things about the common bugs page:

1. You - a Fedora user - can find out what all the known gotchas for Fedora 11 are in one place. No picking through mailing lists or forums - just take a quick peek at the page before you take the leap into Leonidas Land.
2. You - someone who helps other Fedora users - have a handy reference point for all the known gotchas in Fedora 11. No longer will you have to explain the same three issues five times a day! Each entry on the Common Bugs page has a handy anchor link titled "link to this item" which will never change. Just copy and paste that link, and move on with your life.
3. You - a user or a helper - can make life easier for other users and helpers. Just add any issue you come across more than one person getting hurt by onto that page, and it'll make it much easier for others to find out about the problem before it causes them a lot of pain.
4. You - a Fedora developer - can find out easily if there's any commonly-encountered bugs in a package you're involved with, and you can find all the information and a link back to the bug report right there.

Obviously, you now agree with me that the Common Bugs page is the best thing since sliced bread or the indoor toilet. So, how can you help?

It's really easy - everything you need to know to add an issue to the Common Bugs page is right there in the page source, as a comment. If you edit the page you'll see a few chunks of comments which explain how to add an issue (including a template entry), and what else to do when adding one (it's a good idea to make a few complementary changes to the bug report). And don't worry about getting it a bit wrong - several of us in QA and other groups have a watch on the page, and will check new entries and tidy them up if anything's out of place. The important thing is just to get the information down there, the formatting can always be tidied up later.

If you really don't want to edit the Wiki (or sign up for a FAS account so you can), you can just let anyone in the QA team know - via email, IRC, mailing list, blog comment, anything you like - and we'll get it done. You can also mark bug reports in Bugzilla with the CommonBugs keyword to indicate you think they should be mentioned on the Common Bugs page; I'll search through bugs with this keyword every so often and add any appropriate extra issues.

For triagers, when following up on reports, if you notice it has the CommonBugs keyword set, try and update the entry on the Common Bugs page with any significant changes to the bug (for instance, if a new workaround is discovered, or an update released). Or just notify someone in QA of the change and ask them to update the page.

And for everyone - try and refer to the Common Bugs page whenever you tell anyone about Fedora 11. I've found it really helps reduce frustration when you know about a resource where you can learn about common bugs that may affect you, and how to work around them. Without such a resource, people might hit a bug which has a simple explanation and workaround that they're just not aware of, and get really frustrated or wind up avoiding Fedora altogether. Common Bugs can help avoid this. Use the force!