Open Stack

"Dolph Mathews" <dolph.mathews at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 8:30 AM, Julie Pichon <jpichon at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> >
> > I can definitely sympathise with the comment in Stefano's article that
> > there are not enough easy tasks / simple issues for newcomers. There's
> > a lot to learn already when you're starting out (git, gerrit, python,
> > devstack, ...) and simple bugs are so hard to find - something that
> > will take a few minutes to an existing contributor will take much
> > longer for someone who's still figuring out where to get the code
> > from.
> >
> 
> My counterargument to this is to jump straight into
> http://review.openstack.org/ (which happens to be publicly available to
> newcomers).
> 
> Easy tasks / simple issues (i.e. nits!) are *frequently* cited in code
> review, and although our community tends to get hung up on seeing them
> fixed prior merging the patchset in question (sometimes with good reason,
> sometimes due to arbitrary opinion), that doesn't always happen (for
> example, it's not worth delaying approval of an important patch to see a
> typo fixed in an inline comment) and isn't always appropriate (such as,
> "this other thing over here should be refactored").
> 
> There's a lot of such scenarios where new contributors can quickly find
> things to contribute, or at lest provide incredibly valuable feedback to
> the project in the form of reviews! As a bonus, new contributors jumping
> straight into reviews tend to get up to speed on the code base *much* more
> quickly than they otherwise would (IMO), as they become directly involved
> in design discussions, etc.

I wouldn't consider this a counterargument but complementary, it's a
great suggestion. I try to find out what people are interested in
helping out with first and not assume that it's necessarily about
submitting a code contribution either (though so far it's mostly been
the case). Different approaches.

I just realised that "Reviewing" isn't in the table of contents on the
how to contribute landing page [1] and was probably low visibility. I
made a first stab at adding something more explicit about it, feel free
to expand and clarify.

Thanks to the people who contributed to this thread. I look forward to
seeing new projects popping up on OpenHatch soon :-)

Julie

[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/HowToContribute

> 
> 
> >
> > [1]
> > http://opensource.com/business/14/2/analyzing-contributions-to-openstack
> > [2] http://openhatch.org/
> > [3] http://openhatch.org/+projects/OpenStack%20dashboard%20%28Horizon%29
> > [4] https://openhatch.org/wiki/Contacting_new_contributors
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > OpenStack-dev mailing list
> > OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
> > http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
> >
> 
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