700 Ticket Challenge...

… whoops, you missed it.

chromatic challenged parrotteers on Tuesday to get the number of open/new tickets in RT down to 700 before he cuts the monthly release on May 20th. As of now, we're down to 698, twelve days early!

This is still a lot of tickets, but there's still a lot of simple cleanup that can be done.

• Bug reports on old versions of parrot. We are now releasing code every month, and there's a good chance that a bug reported on a previous version no longer exists, or has changed presentation. Try to duplicate the issue with svn-latest or the most recent dev release, and add a note indicating if you could for your platform/revision.
  
• Apply patches! If you're not sure if a patch should be applied, you can still help by trying to apply it to trunk and see if it even applies cleanly; if not, reply to the requester (and the parrot mailing list) asking them to rebase their patch and resubmit it.
  
• Triage TODO items. Many of the TODO items came from XXX comments in the code. Check to see if this is an actual coding task, or something that can be solved by a simple documentation patch.
• Close tickets! Sometimes a ticket will end up getting resolved via comments in email (saved as history on the ticket), but a bug admin simply hasn't gotten around to closing the ticket yet. If you're not a bug admin, you can ping the parrot-porters mailing list at perl.org or let us know on IRC (#parrot on irc.perl.org)
  

Keeping a better handle on what we have in our issue list helps us know how much work is left before we get to 1.0.

So, even if you're not comfortable with hacking on parrot guts, consider helping out with the queue. This can free up those hackers to spend more time implementing features and fixing bugs.

And if you are comfortable, feel free to grab a bug and dig in!

Thanks!