[arch-dev-public] Bringing Bugday Back

[keenerd]

Years ago we had monthly Bug Days.  They were on the second Saturday
of every month, for the global duration of Saturday.  (So 48 hours
thanks to time zones.)

The original Bug Days petered out for a couple of reasons, primarily
because it focused on developer activity instead of community
activity.  I'd like to bring back the monthly Bug Day, but this time
with an entirely community focus.

The basic plan would be to improve the lower-quality bugs in the
tracker.  This mostly involves going through a checklist and fleshing
out where the bug is lacking:

* Was the bug fixed in a new version?
* Is the bug reported upstream?
* Is the bug reproducible?
* Is there a minimum test case?
* Is the bug a regression?
* If so, was it bisected to a version or commit?
* Has another distro already patched around it?

And probably more that escape me.  But there is a lot someone can do
without having a thorough understanding of the code base.  (Obviously
if you do have that understanding, try to write patches.)

Simultaneously, I'd like to extend Bug Day to also cover other
Arch-related "bugs" that aren't on the tracker.  If someone has a
question about improving the accuracy of a wiki article or fixing up a
broken AUR pkgbuild, then Bug Day is a reminder for them to ask a TU
about it.  These are of course all activities that our most diligent
volunteers do every day without prompting.  I'd like to see Bug Days
as a means to help more people become better volunteers.

Previous Bug Days were developer focused, and we needed to have two
developers who could commit to the weekend before Bug Day would go
forward.  We should waive that requirement.  Improving bug reports and
pkgbuilds does not necessarily need devs or TUs at all.  However
without that dev quorum, Bug Days probably shouldn't be announced in
the Arch News.  I don't see that as a problem because much of the
active community follows the BBS or IRC.  Our resident bug wrangler,
Doug Newgard (Scimmia), agrees with the devs-optional sentiment and is
looking forward to the re-opening of Bug Days.

Personally I'll be working on Namcap bugs, or porting Python2 holdouts
to Python3.

Thoughts or criticisms?

-Kyle
http://kmkeen.com