[TYPO3-core] Reanimation of the TYPO3 bug day

[François Suter]

Hi Andy,

> At this time, i`ve remembered, that there was a TYPO3 Bug day.
> In the wiki i`ve found some sites for it. [2]
> So, the last one was in August 2011. Sad :(
>
> I don`t know why this event fell in sleep.
> * To few contributers / activity?
> * Because this event was on a normal working day and many guys get no
> free from his company (it was a normal friday afaik)?
> * Who knows some (other) reasons?

It's hard to say exactly. Originally it was Ingo who organized the Bug 
Days. Then I picked up from him after a first period of "sleep". 
Attendance was always varying but globally declining. After a while that 
demotivated me and I stopped organizing them. It seems like many people 
found that this was a shame, but nobody stepped in to replace me either.

> Okay, thats history. But we live in the present.

It may be history, but if we had a better idea of the reasons, there 
might be a better chance of making a new start, in a more appropriate 
form. Here are the main problems IMO:

- repetitiveness: of course it's nice to say that something happens 
regularly every month, but IMO it also causes people to forget about it, 
because of routine.
- availability of Core Team members: I don't think a Bug Day can happen 
without Core Team members, lest nothing gets committed. But - as 
mentioned by Tolleiv already - it's pretty hard to be available with 
certainty at any given point in time. Olly tried something more 
spontaneous for a while: announcing that he was available online with a 
couple of other Core devs and that people could join as they wished. 
This didn't work out either.
- time span: a single day is actually pretty short. I found myself 
frustrated after most of the bugs days, because I could usually only 
solve a couple of bugs. A lot of time is spent trying to have the proper 
setup to reproduce the bug and rather little is left for debugging. This 
is often underestimated, especially by bug reporters eager for their 
problems to be fixed. In that sense I think that core sprints are to be 
preferred, but it's also of course not easy to be available for a longer 
period of time.

I'm all for the Bug Days to exist again one way or other, but I think 
it's not so easy and I don't know what could be done to foster a better 
attendance.

Cheers

-- 

Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch