How do I subscribe to a bug?

Sometimes people tell me to subscribe to a Launchpad bug so I can follow along it's progress, how do I do this?

Launchpad uses notification emails and Atom feeds to help you stay on top of the bugs that interest you.

There are three ways to get bug notifications by email:

• subscribe to a bug
• subscribe to a milestone, project, package or distribution
• take a role that results in bug mail:
  • bug reporter
  • assignee
  • commenter
  • project or package bug supervisor.

^{from Launchpad's Bug Subscriptions help.}

• First you will need to log in to  Launchpad. If you don't already have a user account, you will need to create one. The Launchpad documentation has instructions on how to set up a user account using OpenID.

  After you've created your OpenID account, sing in to Launchpad:

  

• Next you have to find your Bug. To do this, first find the product that the bug is associated with. Launchpad provides projecte management for many more projects other than Ubuntu.

  

• When you've found the correct projects, visit it's Bug Tracker by clicking Bugs in the top navigation bar.

  

  And find the bug you're interested in. Use the search function, and have a good look through all of the results. Sometimes, a bug's title can be a bit confusing. So make sure you've got the right one(s).

  

  • When you've found the correct bug, open it up and read it. You will get an indication as to the status of the bug.

  

  You can see the importance of this bug is undecided. But it has been confirmed to be a real bug. You also get an indication which package in Ubuntu the bug is related to. Sometimes, there are more than one.

• Now that you've found the correct bug, you may have also been brought here with a link from someone, you can subscribe to it:

  

  Lauchpad will automatically notify you whenever there are changes to the Bug:

  

You can unsubscribe in the same way.

Launchpad's documentation has much more information on:

• User accounts and OpenID

• How to use the Bug Tracker

• Bug subscription

• What a bugs status means:

  ^{· New
  · Incomplete: the bug report is incomplete and needs more information before it can be triaged. Bugs in this state are considered for expiry.
  · Invalid: the report describes the software's normal behaviour, or is unsuitable for any other reason.
  · Confirmed: a member of the community other than the original reporter believes that this report describes a genuine bug in enough detail that a developer could start work on a fix.
  · In Progress: a developer has taken responsibility to fix the bug and has begun work.
  · Fix Committed: a developer has committed his/her fix to the project's codebase.
  · Fix Released: a new version of the software, featuring the bug fix, has been released.}

• If you experience the bug yourself, that is if you can reproduce the problem on your computer, make sure to let Launchpad know:

  

  This alone will not subscribe you to the bug. But it will let the Bug Tracker, and the developers, know that you are affected. The number of people affected is an indication as to how important this bug is.

You can also subscribe to a bugs Atom Feed, using your favourite feed reader.

• Get the Bug's ID from the URL of the page

  

  and add it to your feed reader:

  http://feeds.launchpad.net/bugs/<number>/bug.atom