[The following is a note I sent to the lists today]

Gang:

I’ve been very happy to see a lot of activity on the lists and in bugzilla recently. OpenNMS is all about the community, and nothing pleases me more than to see lots of new people with a sense of ownership toward the project.

With that in mind, we’ve decided to have a “bugfest” to clean up as many bugs as possible for the 1.3.10 release. Those of you watching the subversion commit notices have seen quite a number of them fixed over the last couple of weeks, and we figured that if we all got together for a day we could knock the rest of them out.

Here’s how this works:

1) We will be coordinating this via the #opennms IRC channel on freenode. For those of you who don’t usually use IRC or never have, it is just a way to create a chat room where a group of people can talk. The IRC wikipedia article is a good place to start, and there is even a decent comparison of IRC clients.

When you get your software installed, you will have to connect to a server. In our case it will be “irc.freenode.net”. Then you will want to join the “#opennms” channel (the # sign is important, so don’t leave it off). Most clients with a command line use the “/” symbol to indicate an action, so “/join #opennms” will most likely get you to the right place.

You may also be asked to choose a nickname (or “nick”). Mine is Sortova. The channel is always active, so feel free to test it out before the 2nd.

2) Everyone is welcome, even if you don’t write code. We will be generating a number of snapshots that day, and help with testing (both the installation and functionality) is just as important as code changes. This would also be a good time to brush up on your wiki syntax skills as I’m sure we could always use some help with the documentation.

3) The focus will be on the 1.3.10 tracking bug, although any bug is fair game. The goal is to release 1.3.10 the week of the 4th.

I look forward to seeing some old friends and some new faces. I’ll probably start around 8am to 9am Eastern US time, but there will be people on the channel all day. No one has to stay the whole time, of course, so if you can only spend an hour or two that’s cool.