Hi all, I'm happy to say that Debian-Women's participation in this weekend's Bug Squashing Party was a smashing success. The IRC seminar on Sunday had about 8-10 people -- mostly women -- in active attendance, and an unknown number of lurkers as well; and there was a healthy amount of interest shown and questions asked both during and after. A preliminary log (edited minimally to respect the channel's public logging rules, until I can get permission from the remaining participants) can be found at <http://people.debian.org/~vorlon/rc-bugsquashing-seminar-20050109.txt>.
In their shrewdness, several of our Debian-Women regulars started picking off easier RC bugs earlier in the BSP without waiting for the seminar first, which was great to see. At the end of the presentation, there were 5 people who also stepped up to try their hand at bugsquashing, and we adjourned to the #debian-bugs channel for an intensive session of hands-on training. At the end of the weekend, by my count we had five bugs tagged patch thanks to the efforts of the Debian-Women, and at least one bug with additional documentation in it explaining why it had not yet been fixed in testing; and I believe at this time there are still two bugs outstanding that some of our women are working on patches for as time allows. Even though (AFAIK) none of these patches have led to an actual bug closure yet in the BTS, if you ask me, this is quite an impressive turnout for a group of first-time bugsquashers. If the seminar had come a little earlier in the weekend, I fully expect that some of these patches would have led to NMUs by now. I hope that you will all be willing to help out with RC bugs like this in the future. This sort of thing is very much to the credit of the group, and sets a wonderful example for others that things with "release-critical" in the name needn't be daunting. :) If a tenth of Debian's developers showed as much enthusiasm for BSPs as Debian-Women showed this weekend, we would surely be down to 0 RC bugs in no time... Looking forward, I'm reviewing the log from the seminar together with my original notes, and plan to massage them into a web page over the next few days. I'm definitely learning from the questions that were asked at Sunday's session, so thank you again to all the participants both for putting up with any scatteredness on my part and for your (indirect) contributions to refining the final product. Also, and without meaning to steal too much thunder from the BSP organizers, a few quick statistics: at the beginning of the BSP, the RC bug count for sarge was around 138. With 33 bugs claimed as fixed by the BSP folks, by the end of Sunday we had reached a record low of 111 RC bugs for sarge. And, then of course the number immediately started rising again... Eternal vigilance is the price for free software... :) -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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