[Evolution] Bugday, October 3rd.

[Gerardo Marin <gerardo ximian com>]

Evolution bug days will be starting back up this Thursday, 10/03 in
irc.gnome.org #evolution. For those of you who are new, and don't know
quite what bug day is, or how you can help out, read on...

Evolution has been and will always be based upon community
participation, be either by coding, patching, submitting ideas or bug
reports.
Evolution has grown up into a great product, with lots of features and
functionality.  But also the bug database is still big.  Too big.
As we are closer to version 1.2, we need to test which 1.0.x reports are
still valid, and which bugs have been squashed along the road.
Let's say: we have now around 26,000 reports, and of those around 2,600
are still alive.  Keeping a fast pace of 10 minutes only to
test/reproduce them that would mean 430 hours (almost 2 months!) just to
see if they are valid reports.  And among them there are some that
definitely take longer than 10 minutes.
Add about 30 new reports every day, that have to be triaged... well, you
get the picture.
There are a lot of other tasks necessary for a healthy growth of
Evolution: Testing of new features in HEAD versions, searching for
memory leaks, closing reports when something is reported solved... a
whole bunch of activities that sometimes are slightly overlooked because
of the amount of bugs to be tracked.
We are calling the community- especially those who aren't coding wizards
but are looking to help some other way- to help us by looking into our
bugzilla and helping us to clean up the bug database to help developers
to look into what is really important and not waste time into duplicate
reports, very old code, unusable stack traces or plain crackpot feature
requests.
You don't need to be a 311337 coder to do this.  If you are pretty sure
you have a good dose of common sense then you really don't need a deep
programming language skills to help.  Just a few spare minutes and good
will are sufficient.
If you are interested in participating,  we'll give you a few bug
reports to check on and, in that way, in just a few minutes a day, you
can help Evo get better by identifying bugs that are still there and
cleaning up the database to make it more usable to developers.
If you're interested, please drop by #bugs in irc.gnome.org between 9AM
and 9PM EST [1400 and 0200GMT] on October 3rd and help make Evo even
better, by enforcing its quality, gaining knowledge of Evolution and
giving developers more time to code.


Thank you all!


Gerardo Marin
Ximian Evolution Bugmaster.