Next Python Bug Day: November 20th and 21st

Time: all weekend

Participants may be around at any time, we expect at a minimum people from all US continental timezones, France, and Germany. Most likely there will be others as well.

Join us for an effort at closing some Python bugs and patches. Get quick feedback on your patches and bugfixes, or learn how to submit and examine patches.

How are we doing? Try a Roundup search for bugs closed over the weekend.

Participating at Your User Group

Some Python user groups will meet up in person during the weekend.

Is your local user group participating?

• DC Python Meetup Group (see Sprinting with the DCPython Meetup Group and the project plan).

• NY Python Meetup Group.

• Sao Paulo Python Users Group (GruPy-SP).

• Add your group here!

Participating Online

Participants will meet 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.

Finding Bugs

Using the bug tracker, you can perform various searches to look for candidate issues:

• Bugs classified as 'easy'

• Documentation bugs

Procedures

The goal of the bug day is to process bug reports in the Python bug tracker, trying to fix and close issues.

At PyCon 2008, Brett Cannon provided a slideshow educating new contributors to the Python code.

Brian Curtin has written a Beginners Guide to Core Development.

What to do:

• Grab a copy of the Python SVN trunk. See the development FAQ for instructions. If anonymous access isn't working, you can download a snapshot from the daily snapshot directory.

• See also Getting Set Up and Issue Workflow.

• If you have a problem that isn't in the bug tracker, announce it to the IRC channel, and if it's more than five minutes' work, create a bug report for it. See the 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.") This avoids accidentally duplicating work.

• Consider providing a patch that fixes the problem, or at least a simple test case that demonstrates the bug. Please see the patch submission guidelines before submitting a patch.

• Does the bug appear to be gone in the Python 3.x trunk, but not the 3.1 or 2.7 maintenance branchs? Report that, too.
• If someone else has supplied a fix, see if this fix works for you, and add 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 SVN. The bug tracker has a lot of items in it, and it's easy for bugs to be overlooked.
• Feature requests should be classified as type 'feature request' in the bug tracker.

For later committing

• [add notes here as needed]

Questions?

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

Previous bug days

Bug days for other projects

The 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 their FAQ.

Preparatory Tasks

• Need to set up log of python-dev channel
• Send announcements (python-announce, python-dev, PSF weblog, personal web log. python-list?)