Re: Helping on Git development

[Andrew Ardill <andrew.ardill@gmail.com>]

On 15 September 2011 10:08, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 04:34:38PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> > Is there such a thing as enough coders? :)
>>
>> Ever heard of the Mythical Man-Month ;-)?
>
> I thought git was a silver bullet. :)
>
>> I was simply saying that there already are many people who scratch his
>> own real itch, and we are short of the bandwidth to review them all.
>> It would not help the project at all to add more people who scratch
>> some random non-itches that nobody is actually interested in (e.g. an
>> entry in an unmaintained "bug tracker" that may list irrelevant and
>> stale non issues).
>
> Yeah, that may be. But I don't look at it as "we have enough
> itch-scratchers, so we don't need more". I see it as survival of the
> fittest. You may post a patch series that needs a lot of help, but
> nobody else cares, and it dies off. Or your series may be interesting
> enough that it draws attention, to the detriment of somebody else's
> series (which may take longer to get reviewed and merged). But natural
> selection only works if we have a diverse population to select from.
>
> The downside, of course, is that somebody may end up wasting time going
> down a fruitless road. But for a new contributor, hopefully they learn
> something in the process.
>
>> >   2. Read the list. People will report bugs. Try reproducing them,
>> [...]
>>
>> Yes. In the earlier steps in the above, you may find out that the
>> report was actually not a bug at all (e.g. old issue that has long
>> been fixed, pebcak, or wrong expectation), but even in such a case,
>> reporting your finding would help others.
>
> Very much agreed. I think big organizations like mozilla have people who
> do nothing but bug triage. We are not that big, but it has proven to be
> one area that is easy to break out and distribute to other people.
>
> -Peff
>

Does git even have an issue tracker? I have not seen one anywhere.

>> If you are looking to contribute to the project, a good place to start
>> is http://git-blame.blogspot.com/p/note-from-maintainer.html and in
>> Documentation/howto/maintain-git.txt
>
> I am moderately averse to hardcoding that URL that is guaranteed not to
> survive the maintainer change in our README file. The howto/maintain-git
> document mentions the periodical "A note from the maintainer" posting to
> the list that has the same text, which is a more appropriate reference.

Would a link to the wiki be more appropriate? Perhaps even a 'getting
started' page that collates information like this?

At the moment, while it is easy enough to find the information needed
to understand how the project fits together if you know where to look,
there isn't any concise summation of roles and pain points. The note
from the maintainer goes over the procedures fairly well, and the
what's cooking gives a good idea of what features are being worked on,
but it seems a little disconnected.

When kernel.org comes back online I may have a go at creating such a
page. Any thoughts?

Andrew