On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 3:11 AM, Jim Nasby <Jim.Nasby@bluetreble.com> wrote:
> Which doesn't help anyone, because neither of those provide a list of "hey,
> here's stuff you could do to contribute". The closest we come to that is the
> TODO, which isn't well known and has almost no items for newbies (and the
> newbie items that are there don't offer much advice).
>
> The reason I this matters is because yesterday I posted a task for a new
> hacker with simple guidelines and 24 hours later it was completed[1]. That
> tells me there's people that would love to contribute but don't know how or
> what to contribute.
Jim,
I want to explicitly thank you for your post about that task, I would
like to see more of that. I share the sentiment that there are more
people wanting to contribute but finding it rather hard to find a
starting point. I was (am?) in that position and so far found two ways
out:
1. I looked at the commit fest patches as a list of things to
contribute to (by doing a review which is currently in progress)
2. Robert at some point mentioned in an email "someone could improve
the docs in this patch" so I did that
But I can see that 1. is intimidating to do for new people that might
think "how can you review without ever having looked at the code
before?". Turns out you can and the wiki mentions it explicitly but
it's probably still intimidating for some. And 2. required noticing
Robert's sentence in the middle of a long email thread.
I also think a list of small things suitable for new contributors
would help attracting them. Not all would stick and go on to larger
items but hopefully at least some would.