Florent Thoumie

I usually post those things in my blog first before going to the usual mailing lists but somehow I forgot to write a blog entry about it, so here is one.

Some days ago, linimon and remko have been talking on freebsd-developers and on IRC (#bsdports) about the event that NetBSD held few days ago. The point was to gather committers and submitters on a special IRC channel and dedicate a full week-end to PR hunting and bug fixing. NetBSD managed to close around 270 PRs. Friday, Mark sent another mail about it on -developers. I understood the first mail as “NetBSD has held a Bugathon. Seems it was cool”. When I received this second mail, it sounded more like “I’m not sure you got my point, I said that NetBSD has held a Bugathon, and it seems it is really cool“. So I finally understood that it was really cool

As some of you may know, the Ports Freeze is due for tomorrow, so this was the last week-end before the freeze. Erwin had sent a HEADS-UP about this few days ago basically saying “guys, this is your last chance, get your patches in now or burn in hell”. So, I figured this could be a good week-end to have a Test-Bugathon. Yeah, a “test”, because there has been no announce and if nobody came, we wouldn’t have another one. So, we joined #freebsd-bugbusters on EFNet, and after a few hours, there were approximately 40 committers and contributors, talking about the PRs they wanted to see closed.

On sunday, I’ve installed an IRC bot (supybot, congrats to the authors btw, it’s really a nice piece of software) and wrote two plugins to make things easier (do a gnats query, show a PR summary, show last PR received, show open PR count, ...).

In the end, more than 140 PRs have been either set to closed or patched state. So we definitely will have another one. We’re not sure about the date yet, but it might be the last week end of october.

Interesting links follow:

• FreeBSD Test-Bugathon Announce


• FreeBSD Test-Bugathon Results


• FreeBSD Bugathons Wiki Page