Difference between revisions of "BugBash"

Revision as of 19:28, 22 July 2008

Over recent years, use of the Net-SNMP suite has tended to outstrip the capacity of the developers (both in time and energy) to provide appropriate and effective support. One effect of this has been an ever-increasing list of entries on the project Bug, Patch and Feature Request trackers. There are periodic attempts to address this backlog, but these tend to concentrate on the low hanging fruit, and more complex problems are left for somebody else.

To address this problem, we are going to try an experiment of holding a monthly "Bug Bash" session on the project IRC channel: #net-snmp. The aim is not necessarily to actually fix these outstanding bugs (though that would be nice!). Rather it is to concentrate the collective attention of the Net-SNMP community on selected problems, in the hope of providing suffient information for somebody to then take this further and develop a proper fix. Or else to decide that a particular issue is no longer relevant and can be closed.

To further aid this process, the intention is for these to be "themed" sessions, concentrating on a particular class of bug (e.g. perl-related, those affecting an individual O/S, client applications, a particular group of MIB modules, etc). This wouldn't preclude anyone offering comments on any of the other bugs, of course. But the hope is that by focussing on a particular subset of tracker entries, we can concentrate our efforts and make some progress on the more difficult bugs.

Each BugBash session will have its own wiki page, giving the theme for that session, and listing the main tracker entries to be considered. Hopefully this page will then be updated to serve as a summary of the discussion, and list the volunteers to work on each bug.

Upcoming Session

• (To Be Arranged)

Notes from Previous Sessions

• 2008-07-21