low-hanging-fruit bug user tag for new comers first contributions
Hi there!
Reading the Debian mentors list, I read someone that didn't understand
why a fix to a package wasn't included in the package, even though he
provided a patch, and that it was very easy to fix.
I also remember lamby's self presentation where he explained what made
him do more in Debian was that, his first action in Debian was very well
received: he filed a bug report, and his patch was merged by the
maintainer and included in the next Debian release.
Now that we have mostly migrated everything to Salsa, it's possible to
do merge requests, which save a lot of time for maintainers. It's so
much faster to just click the merge button than it is to manually apply
a patch, edit the changelog and what not.
In OpenStack, there's a special tag for easy to fix bugs that are good
fit for new comers: low-hanging-fruit. On purpose, these bugs are left
open for a while without immediate action, so there can always be easy
contributions left in the todo list.
So I wonder if we couldn't do something similar in Debian: a
low-hanging-fruit usertag (of course, another name is fine to me...),
that new contributor can take care, through a merge request in Salsa.
Ideally, the merge request would also automatically add the entry in
debian/changelog with whatever is the first line of the patch comment,
which is often considered as the tile of the patch, or
Subject/Short-description. This way, package maintainer would really
have nothing to do but accept the patch.
Once that is all in place, then we could direct new comers to that list
of bugs that they can easily fix.
The Salsa part isn't mandatory, it could simply be a usertag and that's
it, and I'm not volunteering for implementing the debian/changelog and
merge request tweaks in Salsa. I just hope others will like my idea and
that it brings more contributions.
Thoughts anyone?
Cheers,
Thomas Goirand (zigo)
Reply to: