Subject: Re: [DISCUSSION] Growing the Git community

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2019 17:03:23 +0200

Hello,

Johannes Schindelin <[email-masked]> writes:
> On Fri, 20 Sep 2019, Mike Hommey wrote:

>> 6. Newcomers don't really have any idea /what/ they could contribute.
>> They either have to come with their own itch to scratch, or read the
>> code to figure out if there's something to fix.
>
> I think this is very related to the "not only open the door, but invite
> contributors in" idea mentioned upthread.
>
> Speaking from my experience as mentor in particular in Outreachy, it is
> often not obvious to old-timers in this here project (including myself!)
> how intimidating even the idea of "scratching your own itch" is, and
> it can be tremendously helpful to even so much as seeing the problem
> stated by somebody else first ("Others agree with me! I need not have
> doubted myself when I ran into this problem, it really is a bug that
> needs to be fixed!").
>
> Additionally, it is no longer all that easy to come up with an "own
> itch" to scratch, as the most common workflows work reasonably well in
> Git. Yet, it seems that some users _still_ want to "give back" by
> contributing patches. Or they just want to see their name in the next
> version's announcement mail.
>
> To address both concerns, I started this little experiment a while ago
> (but announced it only during a Git IRC standup):
> https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/issues is open, intended to
> accumulate possible project ideas. It seems to work reasonably well,
> there already have been volunteers who picked up on some of those ideas
> I (and Denton) listed.
>
> Hopefully this issue tracker (together with https://crbug.com/git which
> targets users more comfortable with that flavor of issue trackers) will
> help address your bullet point?

It would be nice to have those issue trackers announced more widely (on
the homepage, on the Git Rev News homepage, maybe also in docs e.g.
CONTRIBUTING).

For me, beside being the place where to find out some ideas on how to
contribute, would be having a place to put my ideas that I have not had
time to even start to do, like adding `git gui diff` (e.g. borrowing
from tkdiff) and `git instaweb --serve`.

Best,
-- 
Jakub Narębski