What: Gentoo contributors get together to help each other fix bugs

Where: irc.freenode.net, #gentoo-bugs

When: Saturday, January 3, in a timezone near you

What do you need to bring?

• A Gentoo system, an Internet connection and an IRC client
• Your bug. If you don't have one, we will find you one to suit your area of interest and your skills
• Your favorite editor
• A way to test that your bug is fixed (asking people counts!)
• You don't need to know C, C++, or bash

What's a bug? Gentoo's way of tracking change requests. A change request can be anything from "I've found a typo in foo" to "I've built this really useful program called bar but there's no ebuild for it." Bugs have various levels of helpfulness, from identifying the existence of a problem to localizing the problem to providing the patch to fix it.

There are bugs in documentation such as man pages as well as ebuilds and the source code that Gentoo distributes. These bugs are problem reports. Bugs for things Gentoo doesn't do yet but you think should be done are feature requests. Bugday is more about fixing problems than adding features, but you won't be turned away if you want help with a new feature.

Want to know more about Bugday? It's held on the first Saturday of every month. It's an opportunity for everyone to contribute to making Gentoo better, and eventually you might even become a Gentoo developer. See the Bugday project page for more details.

Bugday is about community spirit. Gentoo is a community—there is no "me" and "them", there is only "we," so instead of lobbying for "them" to fix your particular bug, work together to fix it! Bugday is an opportunity to get help to help yourself.

If you've been wanting to get involved but weren't sure how, Bugday is a great way for you to see what goes on in making a distribution and get involved in Gentoo.

Discuss this!

Roy Bamford contributed the draft for this announcement.

The time has come! Our release engineers have been refining their automated builds of the minimal CD and stage3 tarballs, and the first builds are uploaded to our mirrors. Select your favorite mirror and navigate to the /experimental/ directory. Under the x86, amd64, ia64, alpha, and sparc64 architectures, the autobuilds directory contains stages. So far, minimal CD images are only available for x86 and amd64.

We're still working to add automated builds for ppc, ppc64 and hppa as well as CD images for architectures lacking them. We built the stage3 tarballs from the latest stable packages. Fresh builds will show up every week, although sometimes we might skip a week if build problems crop up.

Because these builds are automated, they have not been rigorously tested as the old releases. Occasionally, you might run into problems. If that happens, just try a file from a different week.

Please try out these new builds and leave your feedback on the forums. As always, please report any bugs on Bugzilla.

Happy holidays!

Discuss this!

Ben de Groot contributed the draft for this announcement.

The November issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter has been released. In this month's issue: Kernel team, Incognito, Gentoo-wiki returns, and more!

Discuss This!

The September issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter has been released. In this month's issue: EAPI-2 approved, Gentoo-Quebec training, learn to use iotop, and more!

Discuss This!

In future releases, Gentoo will focus on a more back-to-basics approach that will give you up-to-date install media on a regular basis and make much better use of our human resources. We're looking into automated weekly builds of the minimal CDs and stage tarballs as well as maybe an annual LiveCD release. We will keep you updated as we decide on the details of this new approach.

Consequently, we're canceling the 2008.1 release. The release engineering team has to reconsider its priorities—we overstretched our human resources during the prolonged 2008.0 release process. This caused too much stress for our release engineers and multiple postponements of the release.

You can help! The release engineering team is looking for new volunteers because it perpetually has a severe lack of manpower. We are particularly looking for people with a good grasp of ebuild development and the ability to debug/fix problems that crop up during building and testing of the stage tarballs and ISO images. We will update the staffing needs page with more details.

Discuss this!

Ben de Groot contributed the draft for this announcement.

What: Gentoo contributors get together to help each other fix bugs

Where: irc.freenode.net, #gentoo-bugs

When: Saturday, September 6, in a timezone near you

What do you need to bring?

• A Gentoo system, an Internet connection and an IRC client
• Your bug. If you don't have one, we will find you one to suit your area of interest and your skills
• Your favorite editor
• A way to test that your bug is fixed (asking people counts!)
• You don't need to know C, C++, or bash

What's a bug? Gentoo's way of tracking change requests. A change request can be anything from "I've found a typo in foo" to "I've built this really useful program called bar but there's no ebuild for it." Bugs have various levels of helpfulness, from identifying the existence of a problem to localizing the problem to providing the patch to fix it.

There are bugs in documentation such as man pages as well as ebuilds and the source code that Gentoo distributes. These bugs are problem reports. Bugs for things Gentoo doesn't do yet but you think should be done are feature requests. Bugday is more about fixing problems than adding features, but you won't be turned away if you want help with a new feature.

Want to know more about Bugday? It's held on the first Saturday of every month. It's an opportunity for everyone to contribute to making Gentoo better, and eventually you might even become a Gentoo developer. See the Bugday project page for more details.

Bugday is about community spirit. Gentoo is a community—there is no "me" and "them", there is only "we," so instead of lobbying for "them" to fix your particular bug, work together to fix it! Bugday is an opportunity to get help to help yourself.

If you've been wanting to get involved but weren't sure how, Bugday is a great way for you to see what goes on in making a distribution and get involved in Gentoo.

Discuss this!

Roy Bamford contributed the draft for this announcement.