Thursday, June 14, 2007

Helpwanted

Marking bugs as "helpwanted" is fine and does capture the essence of the desire from a committer standpoint. However I believe this is not enough to engage with the community. Why? Because the codebase is huge and without knowledge of where to start, there is almost no chance for someone to succesfully help.
So what? If you, committer, really want help, you should give a few entry points in the code where to start investigating the problem and if you, community member, really want to help you should ask for those entry points.
In PDE/Build we have done that for a few things that we did not had cycle to fix and the feedback has been great. So why don't you try and see if it helps.

5 comments:

Karl Matthias said...

Good ideas! This is a great place for Junior Jobs. On this bug we talked about an implementation of this for the Eclipse community. Sounds like the kinds of things your suggesting.

Michael Valenta said...

I would also say that if you are not a committer and see a bug marked helpwanted that you would like to tackle but you need more information to get started, don't hesitate to ask for some pointers on the bug report. I suspect that many committers don't provide additional pointers because they are not expecting that someone will care enough about a bug to work on it. Letting them know you want to work on a specific bug will usually result in a pretty good description of where to start.

Frederic Conrotte said...

Maybe this is how you could gather more "juniors" ?

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=168513

Anonymous said...

In my opinion, the nicest way would be to attach a Mylin context to the bug. In that way, one would immediately see which classes and/or methods are involved...

Eugene Kuleshov said...

Michael Valenta beat me into that suggestion. Yes, please don't hesitate to ask! I've been able to contribute few nice patches on Michael's own starting points.