Re: KDE's Junior Jobs equivalent for Gnome

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

Hi,

On Sun, 05 Sep 2004 17:20:42 +0100, Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org> wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-09-05 at 12:30 +0200, Jo Vermeulen wrote:

> > The people of the KDE project [1] tag some bugs as "Junior Jobs",
> > which means they are fairly easy to fix or implement. New contributors
> > can then choose one of these jobs to get into hacking KDE. There have
> > been a couple of articles ([2], [3]) on KDE Dot News [4] about this.
> 
> This is what the "easy-fix" keyword is for; maintainers are meant to add
> this keyword to bugs that would be easy for a new contributor to fix.
> Unfortunately this isn't used as much as we would like.

Yeah, it'd be great to make the easy-fix keyword more useful.  In
order to do so we'd need:

1) Developers to take more time trying to find easy-fix keywords and
marking them as such (I marked a Metacity bug as easy-fix a while ago,
and someone supplied a patch the exact same day!  It was committed
shortly thereafter..)  In order to get developers to do that, it may
be useful to periodically remind developers to use that keyword.  That
sounds like a good project for a volunteer.  :-)

2) Try to fix problems with finding easy-fix keywords.  My experience
has been that the easiest or clearest of the easy-fix bugs are quickly
fixed by someone, making that list deplete quickly.  Also, many
easy-fix keywords are applied, but when someone else starts working on
it and has part of the solution, no one removes the keyword.  Also,
some easy-fix bugs don't really look all that easy.  Combining these
three things, one can see that searching for easy-fix bugs is
sometimes a little more difficult than we'd like.

Fixing the first of the three issues means doing what I stated above
(reminding developers about the easy-fix keyword and asking them to
make more).  Fixing the third issue is hard because easy-fix is a
judgement call anyway and trying to change this might discourage
developers from using the easy-fix keyword.  I have an idea for the
fix for the second issue:

Make a script (similar to others in the bugzilla-new modules under the
reports directory) which searches for bugs with the easy-fix keyword. 
Obviously, filter out any bugs that are closed, but also filter out
bugs with patches attached that have not been reviewed.  (And possibly
filter out those with patches that have been reviewed; i.e. if a patch
is marked needs-work and no one has commented on the bug in a long
time, it need not be filtered out of the shown list).

Since the purpose of this script would be to help volunteers find
projects to get started on, it sounds like making this script should
be a volunteer project too.  :-)  This is a slightly more involved
project, though, since it would require you to install bugzilla on
your own machine (so that you can test), and you would need basic Perl
and MySQL programming ability.  Any volunteers?
 
> We also have the gnome-love project and mailing list to provide help to
> people new to contributing.

Note that the gnome-love project is also trying to maintain a list of
jobs for eager contributors (as well as information to help people
learn about developing with gnome and learn the different ways in
which they can help) at
http://gnomesupport.org/wiki/index.php/GNOMELove


Now, Jo and others:  We do have a couple ways to help new contributors
get started.  But that doesn't mean those ways are perfect.  Are those
ways working?  Are they falling short?  Is there anything we can do to
make things better?


Cheers,
Elijah