HugDay!

I so love organizing the Hugday. That’s all.

In other news, my testing of Intrepid is progressing nicely. I almost have 3D again. I really can’t wait to have both of my monitors working though.

Intrepid Ibex – on it’s way indeed

So I know now that keeping a blog is a tiring bit of work really. If I finish something cool I want to get right on with the next cool thing, or it’s about time for me to head for the sack and I don’t want to chance a typo ridden post. But I must say I do enjoy this Community I’ve got myself strapped on to a

What an awesome month, even though I did almost miss a Hugday by mistake. I did learn something, I am indeed doing something useful it seems. With no announcement e-mail being sent out, there was Zero activity for the Hugday two weeks ago. With the e-mail being sent out the day of the Hugday, there was quite a considerable amount of contribution from names I’ve never seen before. Maybe the HugDay announcement should in-fact be sent out at the start of hugday rather than as a warning to it’s start? Something to chew on indeed.

In other news, today I ran update-manager -d on my main machine. Well it could have gone better, and I can probably fix the problems for myself, but I want to make sure reports are filed and all the needed info is submitted. Not too sure how to go about this task but I already filed a good dozen reports today it seems. Gnome exploded, Empathy is quirky, nv drivers are MIA, virtual consoles are virtually gone, and thank goodness for xfce being installed. I see we have some work over the next two months.

I hope I can get some more patchin’ in after classes start along with my new part time job, Linux Server Monkey at LSSU where I go to school.

Progress

It turns out to be a difficult thing to keep up a blog. I haven’t posted in a while but I sure have done some cool stuff!

First, I got three patches accepted for apt in intrepid ibex. APT! The core, heart, soul of Ubuntu and Debian! My patches! ^_^ to be fair, they where simple patches but here is the changelog entry.

apt (0.7.14ubuntu4) intrepid; urgency=low

  [ Michael Vogt ]
  * apt-pkg/deb/dpkgpm.cc:
    - fix uninitialized variable that caused no apport reports
      to be written sometimes (thanks to Matt Zimmerman)
  * merge patch that enforces stricter https server certificate
    checking (thanks to Arnaud Ebalard, closes: #485960)
  * allow per-mirror specific https settings
    (thanks to Arnaud Ebalard, closes: #485965)
  * add doc/examples/apt-https-method-example.cof
    (thanks to Arnaud Ebalard, closes: #485964)
  * add DPkg::NoTriggers option so that applications that call
    apt/aptitude (like the installer) defer trigger processing
    (thanks to Joey Hess)
  * document --install-recommends and --no-install-recommends
    (thanks to Dereck Wonnacott, LP: #126180)

 [ Dereck Wonnacott ]
  * apt-ftparchive might write corrupt Release files (LP: #46439)
  * Apply --important option to apt-cache depends (LP: #16947)

Two other patches were denied for good reasons. Yet two more await review before they will go anywhere. It’s a really good feeling to submit that debdiff and even better to get a response to it.

I have been recruiting for the Global Bug Jam as well and have a number of people in ##club-Ubuntu that have stepped up to contribute. About 12 or more people at the time seem interested, and that rocks! I hope they use the GBJ to jump start their way to full Ubuntu Members! I have given them the task of assigning packages to bugs, a fairly simple task with little commitment, and to help them I have redone almost all of the BugSquad wiki pages to make sure the documentation is clear. I know I had to struggle to figure out how to get rolling, I hope this lowers the barrier for entry. I even made a screen cast on just what to do and that was fun!

Even though I have been busy on Thursdays and haven’t made a strong appearance for HugDays, I have been silently running them in the background. I hope tomorrow I’ll be around enough to hug a bug or 5.   Although I started all those patches for Apt because I wanted to make up for missing the HugDay.

Back to work I go!

Hugday Today!

Today we had a decently good run with the bug day, I only had time for one bug unfortanatly though. Others picked up the pace, and that made me smile quite a bit when I got home just now. I had to have Wisdom teeth removed, so I was downstate all day with no internet.

Today was a Hugday for Expirable bugs and we had 83 bugs hugged by 14 people, a big jump from the last two weeks! I have to think all the blogging is helping along with the IRC propaganda.

A bug hug to our triagers today:

charlie-tca
DavidFutcher (bobbo)
firefeather
Hew
JerzyMansarliński
Jouni Mettala
Lhademmor
MuhammadTakdir
Nglnx
nhandler
NickEllery
NickNak
sbarjola

See you all next week!

Happiness on CD

Wow, I’ve never been happier to be part of the Ubuntu Community. Yesterday I was with my friend and fixing her mom’s coworker’s computer, a story common to any computer person. Her 10 year old daughter was watching my every click.

I put in an Ubuntu Live CD and booted it up, and first thing she said was “Cool”.

At the end of my fixing, on my way to the door, I handed her the Live CD. She gave me a big hug and excitedly ran back to her mom and began telling her all about FOSS and Ubuntu as I let myself out. The next day I was back to finish my work and low and behold what did I find? Ubuntu with flash installed and more games than I could shake a stick at.

I still have the smile on my face.

First Patch Accepted

http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/rhythmbox/trunk/shell/rb-tray-icon.c?limit_changes=100&revision=5806&view=markup&pathrev=5806

It’s so simple and dumb… but I’m so happy. ^_^

~Dereck

UbuntuBugDay/20080703 -Hug Day

UbuntuBugDay/20080703 – Ubuntu Wiki

Well, The day is just about up for me, about half of the selected bugs were hugged today, and I suppose that isn’t too bad at all. Of 175 bugs bugs, there are only 71 bugs left unhugged. All of the bugs that were confirmed before the Hug Day got a hug, so that is pretty impressive. I think the smaller size had a something to do with that. Eight people contributed to the Hug Day today:

BryceHarrington
Chriscoulson
IulianUdrea
NickEllery
PedroVillavicencio
SergioBarjola
TormodVolden
and myself

I really enjoy how much that I was able to learn today; I learned about how the community works a bit more, learned about features that I didn’t know existed on my own computer, and became somewhat comfortable milling around the mailing lists, irc, wiki, and other places. Ubuntu mailing lists sure generate a *lot* of mail…  Tomarrow  it would be very wise of me to get the information I collected this week in my experiences out of my head and to the wiki where it will do some good for the next person to do this job.

In other news, I’m pretty happy to have joined the newly created Ubuntu-website@ so I might have a chance to do some work on the Ubuntu website directly or indirectly. I feel a bit intimidated to say anything when surrounded by so many smart people though. Hopefully I can make some contrabutions though and in the end be able to point to something on the frontpage of http://www.ubuntu.com and say that I helped make that.

Hug Day – July 3rd

LaunchPad ready, the Wiki full, target locked… Ubuntu Hug Day!

I can’t wait to kick off the Hug Day this week for Xorg, I feel like a real part of the Ubuntu Community now and can’t wait to help others get their feet wet bug hunting. I can’t believe how much I have learned about the comminiy and how things work in general this week, but I hardly feel like I’ve done anything at all.

With the Global Bug Jam coming up not to long from now, I’m hoping there will be a lot of new members in the bugsquad that will be coming in for the first time.

Oh, and don’t forget about the 5-a-day! Hug Day’s are to make-up for lost days.

See you in IRC~

Free Hugs!

When I started Bug Router there were 3600 bugs in the Queue, last night I cleared 3100! At this rate, alone I only have 6 months left… The work on Project Bug Router has been noticed, and that feels good. I got scolded a bit for sending bugs under the package ‘gnome’ and thought that was odd. Not that I got scolded, but that I shouldn’t mark anything under ‘gnome’. It makes sense now that I need to trace down the part of gnome affected, and wow that can be hard. If I can’t find the package, I’ll never be able to find the code and fix it later though. so I keep trudging

Last week I got an e-mail asking if I’d like to help organize the HugDays. Yes! Pedro showed me how to make the list of bugs and I tried it out with a package I see everyday as part of Bug Router, the beastly Xorg. It was so easy, and if it helps free up someones time to work on other things, I’ll happily keep it up! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/20080703

Now that I have done a bit of wiki work, I wonder what other documentation I can add to make things smoother for newcommers. We’ll see what ideas make it from my head to my fingers.

Project Bug Router

I want to become more active in the Linux community and gain a wide perspective of how everything works, and so I came up with an idea; I call it Project Bug Router. There are thousands of bugs that have no package set, and as such will sit in LaunchPad until the end of time. I want to get these bugs into the view of the proper package maintianers and provide an easier point of entry for BugSquad.

Simply set the package on all the bugs in Launchpad under the following link:

https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.searchtext=&orderby=-datecreated&search=Search&field.status%3Alist=New&field.importance%3Alist=Undecided&field.assignee=&field.owner=&field.omit_dupes=on&field.has_patch=&field.has_no_package=on

This is a very attainable first goal for me in addition to the 5-a-day commitment. I make sure that in addition to forwarding the bugs to the right people, at least five bugs get a more thorough rundown.

#ubuntu-us-mi
ok, who is Dereck, and how did he find time to do 121 bugs today?
Man, that’s like “full time job” status.
I have trouble finding ones that I know how to do

This snip from IRC that shows what I felt when I first started bug work, I wanted to do something but every bug I opened was too daunting for me to be able to help. Project Bug Router helps ease the step into the BugSquad because even the packages I couldn’t help confirm or request more information for, I was able to help by just setting the package.

Care to join me? Just add ‘bug-router’ to your 5-a-day tags and start routing!

Time to start a wiki page and get it rolling for real now that I thing I have a grasp on the bug-hunting methodology.