Please join us for Bugathon #7, this weekend (6th-9th August)

[Gavin Atkinson]

(bcc'd to freebsd-stable@, please reply to freebsd-current@)

Hi all,

Apologies for the late notice, but the bug team will be holding a bugathon 
this weekend.  We'll be starting on Friday 6th, and continuing through 
Monday 9th, and the aim is to put a real effort into getting patches from 
PRs into a committable state, and get them committed.  Some PRs will be 
invalid because either the bug no longer exists or was fixed without the 
PR being closed, identifying these is also of great benefit.

The basic plan is to get as many volunteers and committers into the same 
place (#freebsd-bugbusters on EFnet), and work through some PRs.  For this 
particular bugathon, we're planning on focusing on the ~1600 PRs which 
contain patches.  Committers can help by being in the channel and 
available to review patches and commit them, but these events benefit 
especially from volunteers who are not committers:  the more people who 
are able to look at PRs, evalaute the patches, and assess whether the 
patches are correct and/or the best solution to the problem, the better.  
If you've never been more than a user of FreeBSD then this is a great way 
to start to get involved - many of the bugs in the database are relatively 
simple to fix, and are just waiting for somebody with enough time to sit 
down and actually take a close look at the bugs.  If you're able to 
evaluate patches and actually justify why the patch included is the 
correct solution then that is a huge help, too!

So, please join us in #freebsd-bugbusters if you are free at any point 
over the weekend.  I'll be in the channel pretty much all the time during 
the day (GMT) Friday - Monday, and other bugbusters/bugmeisters will be 
around over those four days too.  Everybody is welcome to join us, the 
more eyes the better.  We should hhopefully ave quite a few committers in
the channel too, so there should be plenty of expertise available to 
review and commit the patches that are in a committable state.

There are several wiki pages available for people who are interested 
in joining in, especially:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/Bugathons/2010August
http://wiki.freebsd.org/Bugathons/PRsWithPatches
http://wiki.freebsd.org/BugBusting/Resources

Many thanks,

Gavin