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Monday 6 December 2010

Join us on Saturday for the next openSUSE "Zombie" Bug Day

A bit less than ten days ago, we held an openSUSE Bug Day on what we call the zombie bugs: those are the bugs opened against non-maintained versions of openSUSE. We didn't want to mass-close them, since some of them are still valid and might have important information.

And it turns out we achieved some really great results:

Open bugs in:openSUSE 10.2openSUSE 10.3openSUSE 11.0Total
Before40162526728
After1589360464

We managed to triage 46%36% of those old bugs, thanks to the small team of around 10-15 people who participated! But we want more, and if you feel bad because you were not able to contribute, you'll have another chance to help :-)

We'll do another "Zombie" Bug Day next Saturday (December 11th), in #opensuse-bugs on freenode. The documentation from the last bug day is still valid, and the most important thing that you should know is that everybody can help: just join us and we'll guide you, even if you only have 30 minutes of free time!

And be sure that you'll enjoy it: we had a lot of fun last time!

Friday 26 November 2010

Quick reminder: openSUSE Bug Day tomorrow!

I'm slowly getting back to speed (had to catch up for some time after various travels, more on this later), and I expect exciting action tomorrow during the next openSUSE Bug Day!

There was a thread on "zombie" bugs two weeks ago: the discussion was aobut what we should do for bugs opened against obsolete versions of openSUSE (10.2 to 11.0). Among the solutions that we could think of: doing nothing (okay, not really a solution), mass-closing the bugs, or organizing some teamwork to triage them. I'm personally not a big fan of mass-closing bugs (at least, not before we try a few other things), and I believe bug triage is a really good way to start contributing to a free software project. This lead to the idea of dedicating a bug day to cleaning up those zombie bugs.

Alexander and I quickly worked on organizing this, and we decided that doing it on a Saturday would be a good way to have more participation from people who usually cannot contribute during the week. Hopefully this will work out fine :-) I know that it's not the best timing for our american friends, but we'll do more in the future anyway!

If you want to help openSUSE, join us tomorrow on IRC in #opensuse-bugs (on freenode)! Being on IRC is one of the most important step to participate, since this how we will interact with each other, and this is where you will be able to ping people to get started. You obviously don't have to dedicate your whole day to this, you can come for 30 minutes or 6 hours — it's up to you, but you can be sure that your participation will make a difference! Oh, and I dumped some brief documentation for this bug day; this should help for the first few steps.

Thursday 21 October 2010

openSUSE Conference Party

I'm in Nuremberg since Sunday, and the openSUSE Conference started yesterday. So I have already tons of interesting bits to tell. But the really important part is:

openSUSE Conference Party

Thanks to B1 Systems for sponsoring the party tonight!

Friday 8 October 2010

50000th request

A few hours ago, I submitted the 50000th request in the Build Service. It's a shame that this request is nothing fancy, but at least it's not a submission I did during a massive push to Factory (it's common for me to push tens of packages at once — hey, GNOME is not so small ;-)). Interestingly, Dirk was pushing some KDE packages to Factory around that time too and got requests 49999 and 50001,

(Okay, so, technically, this is not the real 50000th request, since back in August 2009, there was a bug for a short period that caused around 40 requests to start again from 1, but it's a secret!)

For those not familiar with the development of openSUSE, we have a collaboration model in the build service where anyone can submit a change to any package, and the relevant maintainers can then review this request. So it's extremely easy for everyone to update a package to a new version or to add a patch to a package: if you want to do it, then don't ask and just do it! And I'm told we're friendly people, so it's not too hard to find help if needed. The GNOME team is using this feature extensively, and we love it :-)

Now, the sad thing is that I didn't win anything for this 50000th request. Ah, well, I'm sure I'll find a way to celebrate this unique achievement at the openSUSE Conference! And, blast from the past, all this reminded me of the 100000th GNOME bug contest that Luis organized: I did okay back then.

Friday 24 September 2010

Join the openSUSE Conference 2010!

In less than one month, people from all around the world will gather for the openSUSE Conference 2010! It will be in Nuremberg (Germany), from October 20th to 23rd, and the program is full of promises. So don't wait and go straight to the registration form (it's obviously free)!

openSUSE Conference 2010

With the Collaborate accross borders theme, I certainly hope we'll get people from many projects coming: this event is a perfect place to have informal chats between upstream and downstream people, but also between people working on different distributions. We all have a lot in common, sharing many goals, and making sure that communication occurs between all of us is most important.

To build some momentum for the conference, Henne has started interviewing some speakers. There are two interviews so far, but I'm sure he'll keep publishing more until the very last day :-) You can go read my ramblings about GNOME 3, or get to learn about the automated testing work that Bernhard did. He truly did a fantastic job, and what matters most to me is that this is not openSUSE-specific and it could benefit other distributions!

Will you join us to make the openSUSE Conference rock even more? :-)

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by Vincent