Next Bug Day: January 19, 2007
It's always a good time for a push at closing some Python bugs and patches.
When a new bug day is planned, announcements will be sent to the python-dev and python-list mailing lists.
Date: Friday, March 31st 2006.
Time: all day.
Participants are most likely to be around between 9AM to 3PM or so local eople on the US West Coast may want to show up from 9AM to 3PM Pacific time (12PM to 6PM Eastern), because it'll be more convenient.
IRC log: none set up yet.
Preparatory Tasks
- Need to set up log of python-dev channel
Draw up list of candidate bugs (whether by tagging in Roundup, or adding them to the PythonBugDayStatus page).
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
Suggestions for bugs to tackle, as well as the list of bugs currently being worked on, are recorded in this Wiki on the PythonBugDayStatus page.
Procedures
The goal of the bug day is to process bug reports in [http://bugs.python.org/ the Python bug tracker], working on fixing and closing issues. Bugs should be processed in the fashion described by PEP 0003.
What to do:
Grab a copy of the Python 2.6 SVN tree. See [http://www.python.org/dev/devfaq.html#subversion-svn the development FAQ] for instructions. If anonymous access isn't working, you can download a snapshot from [http://svn.python.org/snapshots/ the daily snapshot directory].
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 [http://docs.python.org/dev/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 the Python 2.6 trunk, but not the 2.5 maintenance branch? 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 can be added to the text of PEP 0042 or classified as type 'rfe' (Request for Enhancement) in the bug tracker.
Questions?
If you have questions about the bug day, please add them to this section.
- Does anyone have a Win32 binary of the current svn snapshot? I'd like to help with stdlib bugs, but I don't have a compiler to build the source tree myself.
There is one kindly contributed by Alexander Schremmer at http://moin.pocoo.org/Python25a.
Previous bug days
The first bug day was held Saturday, June 5, 2004, from 9AM to 6PM EDT, ending early because SourceForge CVS stopped working. 30 bugs were closed, and 14 more bugs had enough work done to make them closable.
The second bug day was held July 10 2004. 18 bugs and 21 patches were closed.
The third bug day was Saturday, August 7th. 19 bugs and 12 patches were closed.
The fourth bug day was held Saturday, November 7th. 12 bugs and 10 patches were closed.
The fifth bug day was held Saturday, June 25th 2005. The bug day was ill-fated, as SourceForge was down at the beginning, the weather was hot around the world and the EuroPython conference took place on the same day. Nevertheless, 10 bugs and 7 patches were closed.
The sixth bug day was held Sunday, December 4th 2005. 11 bugs and patches were closed.
The seventh bug day was held Friday, March 31st 2006. 19 bugs and 9 patches (which were mostly submitted at the bug day itself) were closed.
Bug days for other projects
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].