Keeping the "Newcomers" wiki page alive

[Simon Marlow]

On 13/11/2014 07:43, Jan Stolarek wrote:
> I believe that current difficulty field is intended to mean "the amount of time required by
> someone who already knows what to do". Obviously, that's not the metric that we want to use for
> labelling newcomer-friendly tasks. (I wonder if the difficulty field in its current form is even
> useful to us?)
>
> Obviously, the metric that we want is "the amount of code familiarity required to fix a bug". For
> newcommers we probably want tickets that require knowledge of <1000 lines of code.
>
> I think the important questions are:
>
> 1. Do we find the current "difficulty" field useful?
> 2. Should we have a Trac field to label accessibility for newcomers?
>
> My answers are:
> 1. No.

We could remove the Difficulty field, given that it hasn't really been 
useful and it can be subsumed by the keywords field for the things we 
want it for.  It was originally intended to help (a) new developers find 
tickets to work on, and (b) help us find good projects for the GSoc. 
Both of which can be keywords, so I'd be happy to get rid of Difficulty.

Cheers,
Simon



> 2. Yes, we should have a filed with accessibility levels like:
> newcomer/intermediate/advanced/rocket science.
>
> If we have 2) then we can have a list of tickets in the Newcomers page generated dynamically.
>
> Janek
>
> Dnia czwartek, 13 listopada 2014, Richard Eisenberg napisał:
>> Forgive me if I'm repeating others' comments, but the newcomer label, to
>> me, is independent of level of difficulty -- it has much more to do with
>> how "messy" the work is, I think.
>>
>> I'll make a concrete proposal: Tag appropriate bugs/feature requests with
>> "newcomer" and, if you want, mention that you'll mentor in a comment. I
>> don't think there's a glaring need to be able to search by mentor, so I'm
>> not proposing a Trac field for that.
>>
>> If I see here that a few others will adopt this proposal, I'll start doing
>> it -- I already have several tickets in mind.
>>
>> Richard
>>
>> On Nov 12, 2014, at 6:27 PM, Isaac Hollander McCreery <ihmccreery at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Glad people are excited about this,
>>>
>>> I like "beginner/intermediate/advanced".  I think it's more accurate than
>>> "easy/hard" and clearer than "accessible", "welcoming", etc.
>>>
>>> I also want to call out the "mentor" label that the Rust team is using:
>>> experienced devs nominate themselves as mentors on projects, then
>>> newcomers can tackle them with some support.  As a newcomer, that's
>>> *extremely* appealing to me.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Ike
>>>
>>> On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 2:34 PM, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com>
>>> wrote: On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 5:32 PM, Joachim Breitner
>>> <mail at joachim-breitner.de> wrote: The quality that we are looking for is
>>> “tacklabe by a newcomer“, i.e. not requiring too deep knowledge of GHC.
>>> Is there a nice word for that? I found “accessible”, “welcoming”,
>>> “appealing” – anything that sounds good in native English speaker’s ears?
>>> :-)
>>>
>>> Various projects I'm involved with use
>>>
>>> difficulty: beginner (or just "beginner")
>>> babydev-bait (!)
>>> newcomer (several use "newbie" but I do not recommend that label)
>>>
>>> --
>>> brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine
>>> associates allbery.b at gmail.com
>>> ballbery at sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad
>>>       http://sinenomine.net
>>>
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