Re: Facilitating contributions by newcomers

[Christian Kastner <debian@kvr.at>]

On 2014-11-12 02:14, Don Armstrong wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Nov 2014, Christian Kastner wrote:
>> Going even further, what would you see as possible solutions for
>> augmenting bug reports tagged 'entry-point' with the information I
>> mention in first post, ie:
>>
>> On 2014-11-09 20:20, Christian Kastner wrote:
>> >   * A specific objective (bug fix, enhancement, debugging, cleanup,
>> >     documentation, translation, ...). This should probably be tied to a
>> >     Debian bug number.
>> >
>> >   * A description of the required skills (packaging, debugging, C, ...)
>> >
>> >   * A difficulty rating (1:low to 5:very high)
>> >
>> >   * An estimation for the amount of work to be done (hours, days)
>> >
>> >   * An urgency (influenced by severity, popcon, ...)
>> >
>> >   * A list of one or more mentors will to help.
>>
>> Personally, I think that the "required skills" and the "difficulty
>> rating" would be very valuable additions.
>>
>> It may be possible to infer the other attributes from the other metadata
>> eg: urgency ~ severity.
> 
> I'd suggest using the BTS's summary command, which enables you to
> nominate a message whose first paragraph will summarize the bug.
> 
> This is free form, but that's probably good enough (at least for
> starters).

I'd argue it's good enough for the task itself, but searching for areas
to contribute to could still be improved significantly. For example,
given the following list of motivations a new contributor might have

   "I want to help fix simple bugs in C programs."
   "I want to help fix difficult bugs in Java programs."
   "I want to help with translations."
   "I want to help multiarchify packages."
   
a search by the "entry-point" tag alone would indeed reduce the list of
issues to hundreds (thousands?) of entries, but that's still a lot. On
the other hand, if these were possible, I think the value should be
evident (FTR, all flags to how-can-i-help made up):

    $ how-can-I-help --difficulty low --skills C
    $ how-can-I-help --difficulty hard --skills Java
    $ how-can-I-help --type translation
    $ how-can-I-help --difficulty low --skills packaging

And, of course, a web interface for entry-point also wouldn't hurt, I
guess.