On Wednesday, January 18, 2006 18:00GMT (noon eastern time US, 9am US West Coast Time, 7pm central european time), the Drupal community is invited to a Bug Fixing party. Even if you can't attend at that time, you can still help out. Click 'read more' for details.

Drupal 4.7.0 beta 3 was released yesterday. Our party is coordinated via Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Meet fellow Drupalites in the room entitled #drupal-bugfix on the server chat.freenode.net. If you are unfamilar with IRC, you will need to download an IRC client application to your PC. You will need to have downloaded and installed version Drupal 4.7.0 beta 3.

Drupal 4.7 beta 3 release announcement and download link is here.
http://drupal.org/drupal-4.7.0-beta3

You may help in several ways:
(1) Review outstanding bugs. Assure that they are clearly described and are valid as opposed to a misunderstanding on the part of the bug author. If you have installed and/or administered a Drupal site, you can be of great help at this task.

(2) Post follow-ups to outstanding issues clarifying the problem, or stating that the problem is not a software bug, but rather a user misunderstanding. Close duplicate bugs as needed.

(3) Reproduce outstanding bugs. If you can install and administer a Drupal site, you can help replicate problems reported and not yet verified. Your verification plus any additional details you provide will help immensely in quickly locating and fixing the bug. Post follow-ups to the issue indicating that you were able to duplicate the bug, and what your test environment was (operating system, installed modules, browsers, etc. as appropriate) when you duplicated it.

(4) Fix bugs. If you are a developer, look over the outstanding issues list and find some bugs to squash.

(5) Review patches. If you are a developer, monitor the patch queue and assure that the attachments there fix the reported bug and don't cause unwanted side effects.

We will all be together in IRC to help each other out, as well.

After the last bugfix party, Moshe put out a call for volunteers to help organize another party, (http://drupal.org/node/41320#comment-76860) so I volunteered.

Thanks very much to all the developers and contributors for putting together a really terrific CMS. Hope you can come to the bug fix party next Wed.

ae2005

Comments

Steve Dondley’s picture

I encourage everyone to jump in and join the fun. Finding, verifying and fixing bugs can be challenging and rewarding, especially when you know your work is helping to build software that's helping to change the way people communicate on the web. And if you've always wanted to help out on an open source project, this is a great time to get your feet wet.

--
Get better help from Drupal's forums and read this.

kae’s picture

After checking with timeanddate.com, I want to specify that the bug party is at

5pm, London
6pm, Paris
7pm, Bucharest time.

Sorry for confusion. ae2005

gordon’s picture

This will be 5am on the 19th for Australian Eastern Daylight Time.

I will come on a bit later.
--
Gordon Heydon
Heydon Consulting

--
Gordon Heydon

kae’s picture

thank you. please do.

Crell’s picture

How late is this expected to run? I work until 6 pm CST (7 pm EST). I'd love to stop by after work and help out if people will still be around.

--
Larry Garfield
http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog

--
Larry Garfield
http://www.garfieldtech.com/
Thinking Functionally in PHP: https://leanpub.com/thinking-functionally-in-php

kae’s picture

Larry,
thanks so much. Last time it went on for that long I think. do stop by,
ae

kae’s picture

now everyone can come to the drupal bug party! you don't need your own version. there is a demo version up at

http://drupaldemo.org

See node 44486.

thank you very very much toma!
ae

EDIT: added hyperlink (kbahey).

toma’s picture

The website is up and running and i do install some modules and test it, and i post errors, feedback in the website forum,

I need some review / feedback to make the site to work so can help to test , any suggestion or someone want to admin the website with me are welcome please come to drupaldemo.org

Demo test site drupal 4.7 beta 3
http://www.drupaldemo.org

Dries’s picture

To draw some attention to this post, I made it sticky. I'll remove the sticky flag tomorrow night after the bugfix party.

kae’s picture

thank you!

bertboerland’s picture

marking this "sticky" to draw attention was a mistake, it makes the layout ugly, it doesnt add anything for the target adience since they would see it as well if it was one node lower and will create a feature request to make an "even sticky-er" and "yet more sticky-er" button :-)

the target audience (developers and active drupal users who can bug hunt) have enough ways of communicating; IRChats, Mailinglists and trackers. They dont /need/ a sticky post on /the frontpage/ of drupal.org to know what is happening.

The real target audience of /the frontpage/ of drupal.org however, will see an ugly layout with two "rounded corners" boxes and content they dont care about (bughunting).

I am not the type that says we shouldnt post technical stuff or words like "bugs" on the frontpage of drupal.org, but I would like to stress that having a bug-fight-night doesnt have to be announced sticky on the frontpage of drupal.org to be a success. But then again, we might want to discuss what the target audience of /the frontpage/ of drupal.org is...

users and potential users IMHO, not developers perse.

--
groets
bertb

--
groets
bert boerland

sepeck’s picture

the target audience (developers and active drupal users who can bug hunt) have enough ways of communicating; IRChats, Mailinglists and trackers. They dont /need/ a sticky post on /the frontpage/ of drupal.org to know what is happening.

We have suffered a shortage of people able to help with QA and testing. QA and testing have a lower barrier of entry then writing the code but people who are good with php but not familier with Drupal code can use this as a launching point to participate.

The forums are the proper place to announce this and if we draw in folks who are not currently participating through those other methods of communications and let them know that they are welcome, wanted and here's a starting point to learn how to participate, then it's all to the good.

It is incredibly important that we get focus on 4.7 bug hunts and QA. The 'debate' as to what the 'target audience' of the front page of Drupal should be for belongs in a different thread. I myslef use the front page of Drupal for this purpose.

As to the look, I don't see anything wrong with it, but I suspose that's down to personal tastes.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

scamp’s picture

I am new to Drupal. For the past month I have been extensively evaluating a number of CMS products, including Drupal. One of the reasons we eventually chose Drupal was the high-level of community activity.

The level of community participation in Drupal is an asset and should be flaunted. If the concern is the advertising that Drupal has bugs well, it won't take a new user very long to figure that one out for himself anyhow. The concern should not be whether it has bugs, but whether someone is fixing them and improving the product.

That said, I personally would not have been aware of the bug party had I not seen it advertised.
Thanks,

bertboerland’s picture

If the concern is the advertising that Drupal has bugs well, it won't take a new user very long to figure that one out for himself anyhow.

If have nothing against calling for bug hunters or mentioning that drupal has bugs. it is just not sticky frontpage material imho. not a big issue...

hat said, I personally would not have been aware of the bug party had I not seen it advertised.

but are you part of the traget audience? did you participated (dont take this as on offense, i didnt participated myself but lurked around)

--
groets
bertb

--
groets
bert boerland

kae’s picture

I agree with sepeck. as a new user, I would not have learned about the first bug fix party if it had not been sticky at the top. And now today I "fixed" my first bug. I think this is a really good way to draw people in. My regret is that I couldn't edit my original post to say that now www.drupaldemo.org is up (thanks toma!) anyone can bug hunt, even if they don't have 4.7 installed.

to help with the bug fix party, the info is here
http://webchick.net/bugfixwiki/index.php/Main_Page

ae2005

sepeck’s picture

From an email to the dev list from Dries...

There are still a number of showstopping bugs. It would be great if we could focus on these first. Some of the most pressing bugs include:

Unless we can fix those bugs before beta 4 is released, we'll have to release a fifth beta release, which means we won't be able to release Drupal 4.7.0 for another month or so.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

kae’s picture

thanks sepeck. here is what chx has done since yesterday:

> There are still a number of showstopping bugs. It would be great if we
> could focus on these first. Some of the most pressing bugs include:
>
> - http://drupal.org/node/44610
> - http://drupal.org/node/44563

Fixed as of today.

> - http://drupal.org/node/43220
> - http://drupal.org/node/44165

These two are cured by killing MIME magic. I am sorry, but that's the best
we can do.

> - http://drupal.org/node/44011

Awaits Souvent22's decision. If he does not, then I look at it tomorrow.

> - http://drupal.org/node/40762

Either drumm takes this one over or I close it tomorrow.

> - http://drupal.org/node/42277

I leave this to others.

kae’s picture

kae’s picture

Many thanks to everyone to came to the bugfix party yesterday. When I showed up at ten til 9, there were already 6 people waiting. At the height of the party I think there were about 24 people in the channel.

Chx sported his black DrupalCon t-shirt, which gave him extraordinary bug-squashing powers. Chx threatened to communicate in Hungarian if people didn't do x.
Dries came and committed several patches. Dries threatened to do x if people didn't do y. Many thanks also to Dries for publicizing the bug party on the front page of drupal.org.

Thanks to webchick who prepared a wiki bugtracker.
http://webchick.net/bugfixwiki/index.php/Main_Page

Gordon Heydon (Australia) who came before breakfast and coffee and squashed a bug won the award for earliest-rising bug squasher. Thanks to Mozillamonks for offering to take on the biggest bug (just about the last known show-stopper bug). Apparently he didn't know that it was the biggest bug. Thanks also to uwe, wtanaka, mozillamonks, nsk, drumm, and rkerr, for committing patches and fixing bugs. Sorry if I forgot anyone (they didn't list themselves on the wiki).

I left after 11.5 hours, and it was still going. Some people came at the time after getting off work in the U.S. Drumm and Crell and m3averick were holding down the fort.

great party. thank you everyone,
ae2005