Hey there,
I was wondering if anyone in the Greater Manchester area would be interested in attending a Global Jam event in Madlab, in Manchester City Centre, if I were to get off my derrière and organise one. If you don't know what the Ubuntu Global Jam is, then check
this out.
== Bug triage ==
I'm think of running it along several tracks - the first would be bug triage. There are a lot of 'New' and 'Confirmed' bugs affecting Ubuntu's core apps (Rhythmbox, Nautilus, etc) on Launchpad, and given that Unity seems to be receiving a lot of attentions, I think we should make sure that the GTK+ apps that make up the foundation of Ubuntu continue to receive a lot of love. I think reducing the number of new/confirmed bugs would go a long way to achieving that and making the developers lives a lot easier.
== Documentation ==
Another track I was thinking was documentation for new contributors. With all the different upstream projects whose packages are used in Ubuntu, and with all the different version control systems, build systems, bug trackers, programming languages and interface toolkits, budding contributors have an understandably steep learning curve that many find just too daunting to tackle.
While fixing the actual bugs by writing patches is probably too great a task to thoroughly document, what we can do is help them retrieve the source code, build it, and send their patches back to the upstream project. My plan would be to use a Google Plus hangout (because of it's awesome screen sharing feature) to record the process of checking out and building packages like Rhythmbox, Nautilus, Unity and the Software Centre to name a few. this should be done on a virgin Raring install so the viewer can see the whole process, including installing the build dependencies and build tools.
== In summary ==
If this were to go ahead, which is conditional on there being more than just me there, we would work on the following:
- Work through the backlog of 'New' bugs for some core packages and mark them as either 'Invalid', 'Incomplete', or 'Confirmed'.
- Move onto the 'Confirmed' bugs in the core packages (some of which can be quite old) and make sure they're still there. If they can't be reproduced, mark them 'Invalid'. If they can, and the cause can be identified, head into #ubuntu-bugs on Freenode and ask someone in there to mark it as 'Triaged', which means its ready to be seen by a developer.
- While working through all the bugs, we could keep an eye out for bugs that might be of interest to other project within Ubuntu. For example, UI issues might need to be forwarded to the design team, minor annoyances with the interface and workflow as well as some smaller bugs, might be of interest to the One Hundred Paper Cuts team, so they can be forwarded to them.
- Produce some videos on how to build some of the core packages and how to commit changes to the repository for export back to the upstream project. If several of us can get in a Google Plus Hangout, it will probably be a lot more productive than if just a single person was doing it.
These are just some ideas I've had over the course of the weekend, and would welcome suggestions from anyone else.
Again, I'd like to know if there would be at least a handful of people interested in attending before I organise this.
Chris