Re: [gnome-love] Revitalising gnome-love ... some history

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Mon, 2003-11-10 at 12:47, Dave Malcolm wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-11-10 at 00:13, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>
> > At the same time, we need to have something like a TODO list. When
> > somebody comes along who may have experience ranging from "strange
> > ability to crash applications" to "likes writing documentation" to
> > "experienced programmer looking for something to do in spare time", we
> > need to be able to point out low hanging fruit for them. Pointing
> > somebody in the direction of bugzilla and saying "go for it" is, in a
> > sense, professionally irresponsible. That is why my mail yesterday said
> > that it is not possible to provide the required inspiration without
> > planning here.
>
> Perhaps Bugzilla _could_ be used though.  Maybe we could create a new
> Bugzilla keyword:  "gnome-love":  it could be attached to bugs for
> exactly the purpose of maintaining the gnome-love TODO i.e. a maintainer
> adds it to a bug report that (s)he thinks might make a good introductory
> task to help a new volunteer get "stuck in".  

Oh, absolutely. We *could* do things this way. I have vague memories of
having this conversation before on this list a long while ago. The
whiteboard field for each bug exists for pretty much exactly this kind
of "scribbling in the margin" by peripheral groups.

The point I was trying to make in my previous mail is that we don't do
this right now. My comment about bugzilla in its current state is nicely
echoed by Christian Schaller (Uraeus) in this post:

        http://www.advogato.org/person/Uraeus/diary.html?start=235

I don't necessarily agree with his penultimate paragraph (his proposed
solution), but I am right alongside his earlier sentiments.

Periodically, some kind soul has gone through a bunch of bugs and
created a sort of convenient TODO list for that particular moment in
time. Kjarten Maraas is a great one for doing this sort of thing. The
bugsquad also have an ongoing mission to triage things correctly, but
that is again a case of working with the existing keywords to help
maintainers, rather than identifying things that are good for a group
like this one to target.

> Perhaps it's slightly different to "easy-fix" in that a bug might be a
> substantial task, but at least it would be one that a new person could
> attempt.

Agreed.

> At least then the TODO list can be automated, and can filter out the
> tasks that have already been done.

True.

> Plus you can have bugs that aren't bugs, but jobs that need doing.  
> Some of my bugs in Conglomerate are of the "must have a think about such
> and such and decide if we're going to implement it for the 1.0.0
> release" or "must have a good attempt to crash the network code" -
> Bugzilla as project management tool.
>
> Though I'm kinda throwing ideas around here; actually having emails
> discussing things on mailing lists has that personal touch that's
> important when getting people motivated, I think.

Also agreed (please stop reading my mind now). If we did start producing
regular "here are some things to work on" reports, I would like it if
somebody (or a group of somebodies) had the time to roughly triage the
list and provide some guidance for people about where to look. I would
contrast this approach with the weekly accessibility bug report: a good
report, a list of of bugs that need fixing and changes since the last
week. But not much in the way of motivation to get to the places where I
can do something. The barrier is not that high for reading about the
accessibility bugs (Calum's web page list includes a brief summary of
the bug titles), but it may be possible to do even better.

Malcolm