launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Karl Fogel <karl.fogel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Curtis Hovey <curtis.hovey@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>> Is it necessary to post all of the instructions?  Or is it enough for a core 
>> developer to say:
>> 
>>    "This is an easy fix, just
>>     A)...,
>>     B)...,
>>     C)...,
>
> This is often what I do when I tag some this as trivial.

+1, this way seems even better.  It's shorter, it tells the person
exactly what to do, and (with the line below) it makes it clear that
help is available.

>>     I'll sponsor anyone who wants to submit a patch."
>
> This is the Mentor button
>
> Have we already built this feature for other project...we just need to
> use it ourselves?

Well, hmm.  I think the mentoring feature is just confusing.  It says

 "Select the team which would most benefit from this work being
  completed.  People wishing to join this team will be able to see your
  offer in a list of similar ones, and thus be able to prove their
  suitability for team membership more efficiently."

and then offers a team selection box (huh?).  The message it's giving
makes no sense in context.  A person considering fixing this bug is not
trying to join a team, let alone "prove their suitability" for
membership in anything.  The whole thing seems mis-aimed.

I'm not sure how we could make the mentoring feature be an improvement
over simply putting down one's name and contact information and saying
"I'd be happy to mentor this".  Mentoring is an interactive activity, in
which the exchanges between mentor and mentee is both directed and
publicly visible.  Maybe somewhere there's a tool that could do that
better than posting emails to a mailing list, but I can't imagine what
it would be; the mentoring feature certainly doesn't seem like it, IMHO.

For convenience, it might be nice to have a single button that causes a
blurb to be added to the bug saying "So-and-so has offered to help
anyone working on this bug.  Please contact so-and-so for more
information, CC'ing launchpad-dev {AT} lists.launchpad.net."  But that's
a minor convenience hack, not a full-blown feature.

-Karl