As of Friday morning there were 109 RC bugs remaining that affected
both testing and unstable. So we held a bug-squashing party today at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at the office of the
student computing group SIPB.

The BSP was publicized to computer-science students at MIT. About 30
people attended, many of whom had no previous experience contributing
to Debian or other free-software projects.

Four Debian Developers, Sam Hartman, Benjamin Mako Hill, Karl Ramm,
and Christine Spang, were on hand to upload fixes and help everyone
find appropriate bugs and understand Debian norms in responding.

Everyone got their hands dirty on a bug and (except the DDs, I guess)
learned something about bug-fixing and about Debian and working within
a free-software project. 15 people contributed to resolutions or
partial resolutions of 11 RC bugs:

* Waseem Daher closed #436140 as unreproducible
* Tim Abbott fixed #476525, NMU'd by Sam Hartman
* Evan Broder fixed #507071, NMU'd by Karl Ramm
* Sam Hartman downgraded #507072
* Nelson Elhage downgraded #504626 with Sam Hartman's advice
* Quentin Smith reassigned #502845 to the correct package,
and a maintainer downgraded it
* Benjamin Mako Hill tweaked and sponsored a fix for #489501
* Anders Kaseorg identified the upstream fix for #508265
* Eric Price diagnosed #506057 and suggested a fix
* Xavid Pretzer, Sam Freilich, Peter Iannucci, and Jameson Nash
studied #506478, identified the complex upstream change that
incidentally fixed the bug, and proposed a simple fix for Debian
* Greg Price cloned #505440 into #508686 and added a patch,
which fixes the problem behavior in #426465

That leaves 105 RC bugs now remaining that affect both testing and
unstable, with all of today's decrease due to our changes. Some of
our fixes may further decrease the count if maintainers upload our
patches.

We're pleased with the results of this bug-squashing party, both in
moving lenny a few small steps toward release and in inducting more
young people into contributing to Debian and free software. Other
local groups should consider doing similar events.

Cheers,

Greg Price
MIT SIPB



PS - For anyone thinking about a similar event, here's a bit of
Python code we found useful for producing a list of relevant bugs:
http://debathena.mit.edu/debian-bts/bugs-html
http://debathena.mit.edu/debian-bts/rcbugs.py
Sample output is here:
http://debathena.mit.edu/debian-bts/bugs.html


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-REQUEST@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org

On Sun, 14 Dec 2008 02:47:18 -0500
Greg Price <price@MIT.EDU> wrote:

> * Waseem Daher closed #436140 as unreproducible
> * Tim Abbott fixed #476525, NMU'd by Sam Hartman
> * Evan Broder fixed #507071, NMU'd by Karl Ramm
> * Sam Hartman downgraded #507072
> * Nelson Elhage downgraded #504626 with Sam Hartman's advice
> * Quentin Smith reassigned #502845 to the correct package,
> and a maintainer downgraded it
> * Benjamin Mako Hill tweaked and sponsored a fix for #489501
> * Anders Kaseorg identified the upstream fix for #508265
> * Eric Price diagnosed #506057 and suggested a fix
> * Xavid Pretzer, Sam Freilich, Peter Iannucci, and Jameson Nash
> studied #506478, identified the complex upstream change that
> incidentally fixed the bug, and proposed a simple fix for Debian

(s/506478/506748/ - just a typo that confused me for a while.)
#506748 Package: rtorrent (extra
crash rtorrent by scgi-interface (function: 'fi.get_filename_last')

> * Greg Price cloned #505440 into #508686 and added a patch,
> which fixes the problem behavior in #426465

> That leaves 105 RC bugs now remaining that affect both testing and
> unstable, with all of today's decrease due to our changes. Some of
> our fixes may further decrease the count if maintainers upload our
> patches.

Congratulations and thank you for the hard work on the bugs.

> We're pleased with the results of this bug-squashing party, both in
> moving lenny a few small steps toward release and in inducting more
> young people into contributing to Debian and free software. Other
> local groups should consider doing similar events.

Hmm, that's a very good idea - need to do something like this in the
UK, extending an existing idea for a BSP early in the New Year.

> PS - For anyone thinking about a similar event, here's a bit of
> Python code we found useful for producing a list of relevant bugs:
> http://debathena.mit.edu/debian-bts/bugs-html
> http://debathena.mit.edu/debian-bts/rcbugs.py
> Sample output is here:
> http://debathena.mit.edu/debian-bts/bugs.html

More used to seeing the list in alphabetical order by package rather
than numerical order by bug number but that's a minor tweak.

--


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/

On 14 Dec 2008 10:04 +0000, Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> wrote:
> (s/506478/506748/ - just a typo that confused me for a while.)

Err, yes. I'm impressed you tracked it down anyway. =)


> > http://debathena.mit.edu/debian-bts/
> > Sample output is here:
> > http://debathena.mit.edu/debian-bts/bugs.html
>
> More used to seeing the list in alphabetical order by package rather
> than numerical order by bug number but that's a minor tweak.

We sorted by bug number to roughly highlight the old bugs against the
very new ones that the maintainers just haven't gotten to yet.
But YMMV and as you say, the code is easy to tweak.


Greg


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-REQUEST@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org