launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

2009/8/4 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.

+1 too; the sugar coating is redundant for people who are really going
to work on it, and perhaps gives a bad impression.  The more important
thing is that if they do actually post, you should respond.

http://infotrope.net/blog/2009/07/25/standing-out-in-the-crowd-my-oscon-keynote/

has interesting points here.

>>>     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?

It is well-intentioned, but as far as I can see useless at present.

If I'm willing to help mentor new contributors to Bazaar, I'm willing
to do it for all bugs, not just some particular ones.

It might be different in Ubuntu, but I've not observed it.

> 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.

Answers and Merge Proposals are also good ways to handle this, partly
because they help ensure the person's mail is not lost.

> 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.

How about a built-in feature that allows template responses to any
bug?  (Say a dropdown above the response field, accessible only to
project team members.)  That would be useful in many other cases, but
also a good way to give standard pointers to instructions for working
on the bug.

Against this the offer for help sounds more authentic if it is not scripted.

If it was up to me, unless there was data to show the mentor feature
is appreciated, I'd cut it out as an unnecessary distraction.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>