I'm slowly getting back to speed (had to catch up for some time after various travels, more on this later), and I expect exciting action tomorrow during the next openSUSE Bug Day!

There was a thread on "zombie" bugs two weeks ago: the discussion was aobut what we should do for bugs opened against obsolete versions of openSUSE (10.2 to 11.0). Among the solutions that we could think of: doing nothing (okay, not really a solution), mass-closing the bugs, or organizing some teamwork to triage them. I'm personally not a big fan of mass-closing bugs (at least, not before we try a few other things), and I believe bug triage is a really good way to start contributing to a free software project. This lead to the idea of dedicating a bug day to cleaning up those zombie bugs.

Alexander and I quickly worked on organizing this, and we decided that doing it on a Saturday would be a good way to have more participation from people who usually cannot contribute during the week. Hopefully this will work out fine :-) I know that it's not the best timing for our american friends, but we'll do more in the future anyway!

If you want to help openSUSE, join us tomorrow on IRC in #opensuse-bugs (on freenode)! Being on IRC is one of the most important step to participate, since this how we will interact with each other, and this is where you will be able to ping people to get started. You obviously don't have to dedicate your whole day to this, you can come for 30 minutes or 6 hours — it's up to you, but you can be sure that your participation will make a difference! Oh, and I dumped some brief documentation for this bug day; this should help for the first few steps.

A few hours ago, I submitted the 50000th request in the Build Service. It's a shame that this request is nothing fancy, but at least it's not a submission I did during a massive push to Factory (it's common for me to push tens of packages at once — hey, GNOME is not so small ;-)). Interestingly, Dirk was pushing some KDE packages to Factory around that time too and got requests 49999 and 50001,

(Okay, so, technically, this is not the real 50000th request, since back in August 2009, there was a bug for a short period that caused around 40 requests to start again from 1, but it's a secret!)

For those not familiar with the development of openSUSE, we have a collaboration model in the build service where anyone can submit a change to any package, and the relevant maintainers can then review this request. So it's extremely easy for everyone to update a package to a new version or to add a patch to a package: if you want to do it, then don't ask and just do it! And I'm told we're friendly people, so it's not too hard to find help if needed. The GNOME team is using this feature extensively, and we love it :-)

Now, the sad thing is that I didn't win anything for this 50000th request. Ah, well, I'm sure I'll find a way to celebrate this unique achievement at the openSUSE Conference! And, blast from the past, all this reminded me of the 100000th GNOME bug contest that Luis organized: I did okay back then.