Re: Recruiting new contributors and committers [was: Demoralized over JIRA state]

[Dan Brickley <da...@danbri.org>]

On 25 October 2011 03:39, Isabel Drost <is...@apache.org> wrote:
> On 24.10.2011 Grant Ingersoll wrote:
>> Docs is one obvious one.  Also, just keep supplying patches.
>
> Speaking of supplying patches: Doing so seems non-trivial for quite some
> developers.
>
> During the Apache Hadoop Hackathon Berlin earlier this year Jakob Homan did a
> very interesting exercise: The Hadoop project seems to have bug reports that are
> trivial to fix (trivial as in typos in documentation, enhanced error messages
> etc.). Jakob used those to introduce developers to the whole patch generation
> and submission process during the Hackathon.
>
> Dan (and users of Mahout, in particular those who have not yet submitted any
> patch) - do you think that having some of those bugs around (w/o a version
> number assigned, maybe tagged as "trivial") help you get started with being
> active contributors? How about marking issues the community feels manageable for
> newcomers as "mentor" as proposed in the Getting Started guide of community.a.o
> project: http://community.apache.org/gettingStarted/101.html ?

Oops, nearly missed this question. I think it's certainly useful to
have some 'low hanging fruit' flagged. Or 'help wanted'.

However 'trivial' will vary from contributor to contributor; different
problems exercise different skills. You might have folk here who know
the maths inside-out but are rusty with Java; or who problem with
solve Hadoop-based systems on a daily basis, but are new to the
algorithms. Or the likes of me, who'll maybe chase down a bug that's
getting in the way of some specific task they're busy with, but lacks
heavy math or hadoop background.

FWIW I didn't find submitting a patch particularly difficult;
https://cwiki.apache.org/MAHOUT/how-to-contribute.html is quite clear.
The JIRA UI can be a little confusing if you're not used to it, but
the only thing that tripped me up afaik was that I didn't realise it
was OK / preferred to upload the same filename to overwrite earlier
versions of a patch.

cheers,

Dan

> Isabel
>
>