The release of Python 2.4alpha1 is currently scheduled for around July 1st. An organized effort to go through the bug database and close irrelevant bugs or apply fixes would be very useful.

Schedule

The bug day was held Saturday, June 5, 2004, from 9AM to 6PM EDT (1PM to 10PM GMT). It was originally going to be 12 hours long, but then SourceForge CVS stopped working and forced an early end to the day.

We'll try to have another bug day or two before 2.4final ships.

Location

Participants will convene in the #python-dev IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. To learn more about IRC and to find links to IRC clients for various platforms, see http://www.irchelp.org.

Links

Transcripts of the #python-dev channel are being recorded at http://www.amk.ca/python/bugday/.

The list of bugs currently being worked on is recorded in the Wiki, on the PythonBugDayStatus page.

Procedures

The goal of the bug day is to process bug reports in [http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=5470&atid=105470 the Python bug tracker] on SourceForge, providing additional information so that the bug can be fixed and closed. Bugs should be processed in the fashion described by [http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0003.html PEP 3].

What to do:

• Grab a copy of the Python 2.4 CVS tree. See [http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=5470 SourceForge] for instructions. If anonymous CVS isn't working, you can download [http://cvs.perl.org/snapshots/python/python/python-latest.tar.gz a tarball of CVS HEAD] from [http://cvs.perl.org/snapshots/python/python/ the daily snapshot directory].

• If a problem isn't logged on SF, log it. See the

  [http://docs.python.org/lib/reporting-bugs.html bug reporting instructions] to learn how to write bug reports.

• When you choose a bug to work on, announce it to the IRC channel. (e.g. "I'm working on #123456.")
• Consider providing a patch that fixes the problem, or at least a simple test case that demonstrates the bug. Does the bug appear to be gone in Python 2.3.4 or 2.4 CVS? Report that, too.
• If someone else has supplied a fix, see if this fix works for you, and post your results to the bug.
• Read the text of proposed patches and assess them for correctness and code quality. This is usually the most time-consuming step in the bug fixing process, so reading patches is very useful.
• If there's a working fix, feel free to add a note asking for the fix to go into CVS. The SF bug tracker for Python has a lot of bugs in it, and it's easy for bugs to be overlooked.

• Feature requests can be added to the text of [http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0042.html PEP 42] and the bug closed.

Questions?

If you have questions about the bug day, please add them to this section.

Other bug days

The [http://dev.zope.org/CVS/BugDays Zope bug day] has a good description of what to do, though the details of the bug tracker are specific to the Zope project.

The GNOME community holds regular Bug Days; the procedures are described in [http://developer.gnome.org/projects/bugsquad/triage/faq.html their FAQ].