Re: Facilitating contributions by newcomers
On 2014-11-11 03:59, Jordan Metzmeier wrote:
> It is possible to find packages that are not well maintained, but do
> we have an interface for locating them? Even when they are located,
> contributing to them isn't always easy, especially if the maintainer
> is busy or MIA (assuming the package isn't team maint). I guess we do
> have RFAs and orphaned packages, but not a lot of interesting software
> ends up there.
This is one of the problems I had in mind when I wrote:
On 2014-11-09 20:20, Christian Kastner wrote:
> All in all, I think the additional cost to mentors wouldn't be that
> great. It should be easy to write up the tasks: that does not require
> time, only a lot of experience.
For a newcomer, locating worthwhile tasks indeed is difficult. For an
experienced member (within his or her area), it usually isn't.
Experienced members normally have a good idea of what needs to be worked
on, what kind of work it is (-> what skills are required to fix it), how
much work it is, and so on.
Furthermore, a busy maintainer might not have the time to walk a mentee
through an entire upload, but the chances of finding the time to
"scratch some itches" the maintainer has should be higher. These
"itches" could be expressed well in the form of tasks.
And I also fully agree that RFAs and Os are mostly uninteresting, but
doing general QA work is a very important way of contributing to Debian,
and I'm almost certain that many DDs would help more in this regard if
it didn't entail doing a whole RFA but fixing thing step-by-step
instead.
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