Greetings, one and all!
I've alluded several times in the past month to having a plan for
helping manage our ever-growing bug list in the issue tracker. We're now
ready to roll out phase one of this plan, and we need *you*!
Starting this month, we will be sponsoring two bug hunt days monthly, on
the third Thursday and Friday of the month. That's this upcoming
Thursday and Friday, 17-18 September 2009.
During those days, the Zend team -- myself, Ralph, and Alex -- will be
in #zftalk.dev on Freenode for our entire work day (Ralph and myself are
in the United States, Alex is based in Russia; figure out the timezones
yourself (-: ). We will be triaging bugs ourselves, but, more
importantly, we will be there to help facilitate *you*, our contributors
and users, in resolving issue reports.
As an incentive, each month, we will ship a Zend Framework t-shirt to
the individual that assists in the most issue resolutions during the bug
hunt days, whether via patches or direct commits. Quarterly, we will
evaluate overall contributions, including documentation, bug fixes, and
newly contributed components, and award a developer with their choice of
a Zend Studio license or Zend Framework Certification voucher. (Caveat:
one t-shirt per person per year, and one license/voucher per person per
year, folks!)
For those interested in participating in the bug hunt days, the rules
are simple: have a signed CLA on file, and resolve issues in the
tracker.
If you have not yet signed a CLA and want to participate, you can get a
copy of the form here:
http://framework.zend.com/cla
Sign it and return it (you can email it, fax it, or send it via post);
if you send it via post, you'll need to wait for confirmation that
we've received it before we can accept code contributions from you.
Now, when it comes to the issue tracker, you'll need to determine if the
issue:
* is simply the reporter misunderstanding or misusing code OR
* is a request for a new feature OR
* is a reproducible issue
In the first case, comment on it and indicate the correct usage, and ask
the component maintainer or somebody from Zend to review your response
and mark the issue as resolved. In the second case, please try and focus
on issue reports instead of feature requests during the bug hunt days.
That brings us to the final case, reproducible issue reports. With
these, you'll need to do the following:
* Capture the reproduce case as a unit test
* Resolve the issue in such a way as to maintain backwards
compatibility with existing usage. (In other words, don't change the
signature of a method unless the signature is what is actually
broken.)
>From there, you then have two options:
* If you already have commit access, commit the test and fix to the
repository, and either resolve the issue or ask somebody from Zend to
review and resolve. Don't forget to merge your changes to the 1.9
release branch!
* If you do not have commit rights, create a patch with the unit test
and fix, and attach the patch to the issue. Ask the maintainer or
somebody from Zend to review and apply the patch.
If you need help creating the unit test or patch file, hop onto the
#zftalk.dev IRC channel and ask for help.
How should you choose issues to work on? Answer the following questions,
and you should be able to hop right in:
* What components do you have expertise in?
* What components are you interested in learning more about?
* What issues have a high number of voters or watchers?
Bug hunting should be fun, so pick components and issues you're
interested in. Ask questions on IRC if you don't understand how
something works.
So, spread the word, and come prepared this week to help make the
framework even better! I look forward to seeing you on IRC this week!
--
Matthew Weier O'Phinney
Project Lead | [email protected]
Zend Framework | http://framework.zend.com/
