Jason Bassford wrote:
>>Andrew, because Peter thinks his keyword is really useful I'm giving you
>>a list of bugs that Peter has determined to be low risk (they're not,
>>
>
> Peter never said that they were low risk. In fact, he has
> repeatedly said that they were only suggestions and that, since he's
> not a programmer (something else he's said repeatedly), it was up to
> those who are programmers to tell him if they are low risk or not.
> The only thing he's said is that he *believes* that they *might* be
> low risk.
So it's time for programmers to stop what they're doing and evaluate
bugs to see if Peter's keyword is accurate? I believe I just read a post
from Peter saying that keywords should be added when they fit and
another post saying that he has no way of knowing whether his keyword
fits because he's not a developer. Now we're supposed to tell people
"make your best guess, possibly misinfroming new contributors and all
the developers and QA with unlimited free time will come along and
confirm or remove the keyword"?
What Peter wants and what you want are two different things. What Peter
wants is another keyword that he thinks will help get specific bugs
fixed. What you want is a general mechanism for pointing new
contributors to bugs that are easy to fix. Your proposition requires, I
believe, several things none of which are a new keyword. You want
developers (or other sufficiently knowledgeable people) to flag bugs
that they deem easy to fix for someone who doesn't know anything about
Mozilla. You then want that list of bugs to be posted to a prominent
place with additional documentation to educate the new contributor
enough that he could fix the bug and understand all the other necessary
steps to getting the bug checked in. I argue that there isn't a single
bug in the database that a new contributor could get checked in without
first communicating with a real person (either in Bugzilla, newsgroup or
IRC) and that while better documentation (looking for volunteers.) can
always make it easier for new folks, it is not the primary barrier to
entry nor would eliminate the largest barrier to entry, that our app is
large and complex. I'm all for making it easier to contribute. My area
is QA and testing. I don't have the time to put together all the
documentation your're looking for and even if I did Peter's keyword
wouldn't help and would make my job of teaching people how to use
Bugzilla and keywords that much more difficult.
So in the mean time I'm more than willing to give some one-on-one
instruction in the process to new code contributors like you. If enough
of you tell me I'm not wanted and they'd rather read some boilerplate
text or be handed a list of bugs that someone thinks you should be able
to fix then I'll stop trying to give the one-on-one help and go back to
my real job of organizing QA and testing efforts.
Peter has freely admitted that he didn't know how to add keywords
sometime between 4 and 6 months ago. I think the fact that he had been
active in well over 200 bugs (and adding plenty of keywords) before that
time is evidence that we shouldn't be doing anything to make keywords
any more difficult to understand than they already are.
--Asa
