[gentoo-dev] ANNOUNCING: Great 2003 Gentoo Bug Hunt (with prizes)

[Daniel Robbins]

Hi All,

(please direct all replies to gentoo-dev only (if appropriate;) I'm
cross-posting this email so no one misses it.)

Today (Oct 1 2003) marks the beginning of the Great 2003 Gentoo Bug
Hunt. 

What makes this bug hunt so "Great," you ask? I don't know. Hmm. How
about... bunches of free hardware to be awarded to the top bug
squashers? Yep, sounds good.

Here's how it works. Starting today and ending 23:59:59 Dec 31 2003 UTC,
we will keep a tally of total number of bug reports closed by developers
(actually, we'll run a mysql query in 3 months on Jan 1, but "keeping a
tally" reads better.) The top bug squashers will take their pick from a
cache of hardware components. The #1 squasher will get first pick, the
number 2 squasher second pick, etc. 

The stash of things you can win will consist of new hardware components
(unless there's a really exceptional used component that is available --
the point is, all the stuff being raffled will be desirable, not
someone's old burnt-out Pentium 133): stuff like motherboards, CPUs
(maybe some mobo/cpu combos,) RAM, hard drives, video cards, etc. These
items will be purchased in late December in order to maximize the
up-to-dateness and yumminess of the to-be-awarded prizes. 

It gets better. Thanks to the success of the Gentoo Store, it looks like
we may be able to do twice a year in 2004 at the very least.

Want to get involved, squash some bugs and possibly get some free
hardware? Here are some tips:

1. Be sure to participate in the upcoming Gentoo Bug Day on Sat, Oct 4
2003, and on the first Satuday of every month (Nov, Dec.)

2. Scour bugzilla for bugs that you can fix and/or close. To get credit
for a bug, assign it to yourself before you close it. Don't close a bug
unless you've really fixed the issue. Don't blow off or be mean to bug
submitters just so that you can close a bug. Professionalism is
important.

3. If you close dups, each dup you close *will* count. You're helping to
keep bugzilla clean and usable.

4. For bugs that contain new ebuilds to be added to Portage, you can
close the bug after the ebuild has been QA checked (by you) and added to
the tree (to unstable.) Do not add new ebuilds blindly, and do not add
new versions of existing packages without diffing with the most-recent
version currently in the tree -- sometimes, people use version 1.2 to
create 1.5, but we have 1.3 which includes an important build fix. And
if you add 1.5 without looking at 1.3, you might accidentally omit the
build fix which would be bad. (just a quick example.)

5. Respect herds and existing maintainers. Look at the Changelog and
metadata.xml. If the last committer is not an active dev, it is
certainly OK to take some initiative and close the bug yourself. But see
if they're active first. If they are, you might want to get their input
first (depending on the complexity of the package.) Beware of important
libraries and system packages, which should be treated with the utmost
care and deferred to the official maintainer(s) (according to
metadata.xml or ChangeLog.)

6. Likewise, if you are a developer who has a lot of bugs assigned to
you, but you haven't had the time to tackle your bugs, please *allow
others to close them for you.* Smile when they do. Let others help you
out.

7. Have fun! The time you spend hacking on Gentoo is appreciated, and I
hope these prizes will help make bug squashing a bit more exciting...
and rewarding.

Sincerely,

Daniel