Planning/BugDay

What's a Bug Day

A Bug Day is a day where QEMU developers and users focus on triage, reporting, and fixing bugs. People are encouraged to sign up to participate in the events and a dedicated IRC channel is used to make sure everyone can collaborate efficiently.

How Can I Participate?

There are many ways to participate in a bug day. The first step is to sign up on the wiki and join the IRC channel.

For Users

A bug day is a good opportunity to take the time to record any of the bugs you've experience in the bug tracker. If you have questions about how to file the bug or what information should be included, you can ask in the IRC channel.

For Testers and Power Users

A very valuable contribution you can make to a bug day is to triage existing bugs. Very often, bugs will be reported against outdated versions of QEMU or will not contain enough information to reliably reproduce the problem. You can do the following things to improve bug reports:

1. If you can reproduce a bug on the reported version, mark the bug as 'Confirmed'
2. If you can confirm the bug, try to reproduce it in the latest released version and update the bug report with that info
3. If you can confirm the bug in the latest release, try to reproduce the bug in the latest git and record the changeset you tested against in the bug report

For Developers

This is a good opportunity to look through the bug tracker for bugs that are easy to fix or that may have already been fixed by existing commits. Most bugs are filed by users who genuinely appreciate all the work that's gone into QEMU and are taking time to try and be helpful. Responding to bug reports, even for issues that have been resolved or are invalid, is a great way to encourage those users to provide even more feedback.