This page details rough plans for Bugathon #7, which will take place between 6th-9th August, 2010 on #freebsd-bugbusters on efnet.
Background
Like previous Bugathons, we're hoping to focus on a partiucular area: PRs with patches. The aim is to try to evaluate and possibly commit as many PRs which contain patches as is possible. Around 1600 non-ports PRs and 400 ports PRs contain patches, and a significant number of these may well be committable as-is. I've documented why we're focusing on this in more detail here.
Just because the primary aim is to look at PRs with patches, doesn't mean that we'll be ignoring the rest. Indeed, to some extent it depends on which committers make themselves available, and their area of expertise. If a few people offer to help who have experience with the network stack, for example, then spending some time looking into them is time well spent.
Plan of action
We'll convene on the IRC channel starting Friday 6th August, and start to look through PRs. A list of PRs tagged as containing patches is posted weekly to freebsd-bugs@, and is also available as an interactive version.
For those wanting to help out, please add your details to BugBusting/Volunteers, and join us on IRC on #freebsd-bugbusters on efnet.
Volunteers
For those helping out who are not committers, the best plan is to pick a PR in an area that you are familiar with and/or can test, and try the patch. If you've tested it and are confident that the patch is correct, submit a followup to the PR saying so, and if possible (and concise enough) submit an example of behaviour before and after. Then, drop a message into the IRC channel. Hopefully a committer will pick the PR up, verify that it looks sensible and commit it. If not, the PR can be added to the PRs recommended for committer evaluation by the bugbusting team by anyone with freefall access so that it doesn't get lost.
MarkLinimon has put a huge amount of work into the BugBusting and BugBusting/Resources wiki pages, and the pages linked from them. There is now a large quantity of information available for bugbusters on the BugBusting/Resources page for anyone interested in helping out.
Committers
As mentioned above, non-committers will be both announcing PRs that are believed to be ready to commit in the IRC channel, but also these PRs will be added to the list of recommended PRs. The source of this file is ~linimon/public_html/recommended.prs, which is world-writable, and closed PRs will automatically be removed from the generated HTML.
For those with freefall access, a list of unallocated PRs containing patches can be generated with:
query-pr -q -x -t '\[patch\]' -r freebsd-
Similarly, to list (e.g.) non-ports PRs, use:
query-pr -q -x -t '\[patch\]' -r freebsd- | awk '$3 !~ /ports/ { print }'
It would be good if any commits originating from this bugathon made mention of the fact in the commit message - this helps to get word out that it is occuring, and also shows people how effective bugathons can be.