Re: shortened flags affair, part 8: choosing appropriate flag (issue4312057)

[Graham Percival]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 11:29:21PM +0200, Janek Warchoł wrote:
> If you are curious about why i twice did try to pick up and fix an
> issue without any questions and discussion, it was partly because of
> http://percival-music.ca/blogfiles/sustainable.pdf (page 24, "net gain
> to the project"). Unfortunately i was unlucky and now i don't trust
> our issue tracker (i'm just stating a fact).

Understandably so.  We simply *cannot* trust the issue tracker in
its current form, and this keeps on frustrating new contributors.

It's a chicken and egg problem: there's no point fixing the issues
because not enough contributors use it, and few contributors use
it because the issues are broken.

The "least bad" way forward that I can see is to pair up new
contributors with mentors, and really really encourage them to ask
their mentors often.  (see below)

> This is also the reason why i didn't ask questions "every 10 minutes":
> i didn't want to spend advanced developers' precious time until i
> really got stuck and really required help to proceed

The idea isn't that you ask serious questions every 10 minutes...
or rather, you don't always ask a question expecting to have a
complete answer.

For example, if I had a mentor and was a new Frog, I might
identify 1135 as something that I wanted to work on.  Then I'd
email my mentor and say "hey, this thing looks easy, but is it
still valid?"  The my mentor would take a quick glance at
identifiers.itely, see that it's still a problem, and then reply
"yes, go for it".  OTOH, if I picked 1453, then my mentor would
hopefully be sufficiently familiar with the documentation that he
could say "no wait, that was pushed a month ago, but nobody marked
it fixed.  Sorry!  Pick another one".

OTOH, if you were working on 1245, you might say "I'm having
trouble finding any information about festival at all.  Should it
really be this hard?" and then if I were the mentor, I'd say
"well, it probably shouldn't be that hard, but I'm certain that
nobody on the lilypond devel team knows anything more than you.
Just keep on searching the internet for anything about festival
song format, and maybe send some requests to any mailing lists you
can find?"
(in other words, "no you're not missing any simple solution to
your problem".)


In both cases, the mentor's answer only took 1-2minutes to write,
but it can save the contributor a lot of time, or at the very
least, it can reassure the contributor that he's working in the
right manner.

> - hoping that developers would be grateful for not wasting their
> time and express this by responsing promptly when i finally
> asked for help.  As we have seen, this didn't work...

I don't think it's a matter of gratitude; it's a problem of
knowledge.  80% of people on this list don't know enough to help
you.

Cheers,
- Graham