Hello here, After disconnecting a bit working on the 2.11.1 release (glad it's about to be released finally) I caught up with some recent issues and I think the "assign" feature gets somewhat abused.
There are a number of issues where new contributors ask to be assigned and they either don't work on or what they submit is mostly AI slop. I think one of the reasons for that is "Assigning" might be seen by some people as a sign of trust and maybe they somehow bust their reputation by having issues assigned to them. Now, I think our "assignment" was always a bit broken - when issues had people assigned, it kinda blocked others from working on them - I've seen quite a few comments from people "I would like to work on some issue but there was someone already assigned". We did not actively clean the people who did not complete their "assignments" (and we do not want to spend time on it either) - and some of the old issues that have people assigned are simply not touched by new contributors. Assignment has two roles - one is to maybe allow people to see issues they are assigned to, and two - it's a kind of lock preventing more than one person from working on the same issue. Some people in the past complained that they were assigned - but someone else got a PR - so this is also how some people understand it. With the current AI-slop era and people signing up for many things they often have no idea how to do - trusting that agents will do it for them, I think the 2nd role is quite broken. While in essence it was supposed to prevent two people working on the same thing, right now it might prevent people who know what they are doing to work on those issues. *Proposal:* I think we can "unbreak it" by changing a bit what "assignment" is and adapting our process. I believe we should start treating assignment as: ** "I know the person and I trust they will get it done or unassign themselves if they can't complete"* I think we should: - only assign issues to committers/trusted contributors who we trust will work on the issue and lead to completion, and that they un-assign themselves if they see they cannot complete it. We will actually expect people to do this un-assignment in case they want to "free" the issue. - stop assigning unknown people when they ask and strongly *DISCOURAGE* them from asking "can I take the issue". We should add in our contributing docs and repeat it if people do not read it that we are not assigning issues to new contributors and they should just open PRs if they want to work on something without asking - this will hopefully cut a lot of noise from issue comments - describe that it is absolutely ok if an issue is not assigned and several people work on it - whoever gets good green, reviewed PR will win, others might also help to review other's PRs on the same issues if they see other PRs are better. I think that will help a bit with issues being effectively blocked by people (or bots) who do not work on them, and cut the noise a bit on "asking" or "taking" issues - especially if we keep on reminding it to people; I am happy to do initial unassignment of current issues and to make a PR proposal for our contribution guide update. Let me know what you think - any comments are welcome as usual. J,
