Re: Pain points in Git's patch flow

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 14, 2021, 08:02 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq7dl5z425.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <b562e614-add7-575f-3013-1dbc667bc5bf@gmail.com>

Bagas Sanjaya <bagasdotme@gmail.com> writes:

> There is no lists of "beginner-friendly" issues that can be worked on by
> new contributors. They had to search this ML archive for bug report
> issues and determine themselves which are beginner-friendly.

Yeah, looking for "#leftoverbits" or "low-hanging" on the list archive is often cited as a way, and it does seem easy enough to do. You go to https://lore.kernel.org/git/, type "leftoverbits" or "low-hanging" in the text input and press SEARCH.

But that is only half of the story.

Anybody can throw random ideas and label them "#leftoverbits" or "low-hanging fruit", but some of these ideas might turn out to be ill-conceived or outright nonsense. Limiting search to the utterances by those with known good taste does help, but as a newbie, you do not know who these people with good taste are.

It might help to have a curated list of starter tasks, but I suspect that they tend to get depleted rather quickly---by definition the ones on the list are easy to do and there is nothing to stop an eager newbie from eating all of them in one sitting X-(.

So, I dunno. We seem to suffer from the same lack of good starter tasks before each GSoC begins.