[plug] Report from the recent Debian bug squashing party at UCC

[Paul Wise]

Hi all,

We recently held a Debian bug squashing party (BSP) at UCC, UWA. Over
the weekend we had about 10 or so people show up to participate, learn
about fixing bugs in Debian and try to fix some. The BSP co-incided with
a weekend heat wave with temperatures reaching 38°C and the venue lacked
air conditioning. Most of the attendees were new to Debian development
but were Debian users. Our focus was on release critical bugs
highlighted by rc-alert and the UDD bugs list, but we also discussed
IPv6 bugs in CUPS and some bugs that were affecting UCC infrastructure.
The UCC president also worked on fixing their door-locking system,
replacing the broken system based on an ancient modem with an Arduino
board. We managed to fix, work on or investigate 12 or more bugs. I was
hoping we would get through more, but the weather and the average
experience level conspired against us. After we were done on Sunday a
few of us went down to the local pub to have a meal, a beer and some
geeky conversation. All in all we had a good time and got some bugs
fixed.

The UCC president seemed to be keen on doing another BSP, hopefully we
can do another one before the freeze happens. There were a few people
who missed the BSP so it would be good to give them a chance to work on
some bugs.

Thanks go to the UCC folks for the venue and to PLUG folks for helping
with organisation and promotion of the event.

For those of you who weren't able to make it, you can participate in
squashing bugs at home, the links at the bottom of our BSP wiki page
should help give you some ideas about squashing bugs, here is an intro:

In general, to find some bugs you might care about, install the
devscripts package and run rc-alert (optionally with options for sorting
by local or global popcon or restricting the suites) and pick a bug. If
you can't find any, then take a look at the UDD bugs list.

To fix a bug you will want a Debian testing install with some deb-src
lines for testing or unstable in your apt sources.list. You will want
pbuilder, cowbuilder or sbuild installed so you can build packages in a
clean chroot. Read the bug log to get an idea about what issue is about.
If you need to do an upload, check the developers reference (devref) for
procedures about non-maintainer uploads. You will also need a sponsor to
do the upload for you, check the mentors site for information about
that. If you have any questions about the process, folks on
#debian-mentors on irc.oftc.net can help you out.

If you encounter any confusing Debian-specific jargon, check the
glossary page on the Debian wiki for information.

PS: DebConf12 is in Nicaragua this year, everyone is welcome. We are
also looking for sponsors to help meet the costs of the conference. If
your work uses Debian you may want to help support the conference
financially.

http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2012/03/au/Perth
http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/pkgs.html#nmu
http://mentors.debian.net/
http://wiki.debian.org/Glossary
http://debconf12.debconf.org/
http://debconf12.debconf.org/become-sponsor.xhtml

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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