Hi, I was about to suggest the same thing. I also started my own list for the last hackathon at https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ZuriHac2014#Possibletickets but something like https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/query?keywords=~newcomer would be even nicer. Of course there is the bike-shedding question of what the keyword should be. “easy” is obvious, but I don’t like it a lot: These tickets are not necessary easy, and we don’t want new contributors to think that we only trust them to do easy stuff. 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? :-) About filling the list: I suggest that if you see a new ticket on ghc-tickets filed that you would recommend to a newcomer, simply set the keyword. This has the side-effect that at least one developer get’s CCed when a newcomer comes along and posts questions to the ticket. Greetings, Joachim -- Joachim “nomeata” Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de • http://www.joachim-breitner.de/ Jabber: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de • GPG-Key: 0xF0FBF51F Debian Developer: nomeata@debian.org

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 wrote:

On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 5:32 PM, Joachim Breitner < mail@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@gmail.com ballbery@sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net

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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. 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 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 wrote: On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 5:32 PM, Joachim Breitner 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@gmail.com ballbery@sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net

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HEADS UP: if you see a ticket that is easy enough to be tackled by a newcomer please tag it using "newcomer" keyword. I already added "newcomer" keyword to tickets that were listed on the Newcomers page and replaced the static list with dynamicaly generated one. I decided to filter out tickets that have an owner so that people are not redirected to tickets that are being worked on. Janek

Thanks for doing this Jan. I think a ticket category works a lot better than just a page alone. Simon and I talked about this once, and another good point is that by having a category, it's a lot easier for regular, more experienced developers to sweep the 'newcomers' list and fix anything that needs it, perhaps for a pending release that may be soon. But these days we seem to have a somewhat healthy influx of developers and patches, so maybe these tickets can just get fixed the natural way. :) On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 3:31 AM, Joachim Breitner wrote:

Hi,

Am Donnerstag, den 13.11.2014, 14:56 +0100 schrieb Jan Stolarek:

...

HEADS UP: if you see a ticket that is easy enough to be tackled by a newcomer please tag it using "newcomer" keyword.

I already added "newcomer" keyword to tickets that were listed on the Newcomers page and replaced the static list with dynamicaly generated one. I decided to filter out tickets that have an owner so that people are not redirected to tickets that are being worked on.

incidentally, Debian started to use the same tag "newcomer" to tag its bugs of the same nature: http://www.donarmstrong.com/posts/newcomer_bts_tag/

So our choice of tag was a good one :-)

Greetings, Joachim

-- Joachim “nomeata” Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de • http://www.joachim-breitner.de/ Jabber: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de • GPG-Key: 0xF0FBF51F Debian Developer: nomeata@debian.org

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I am entirely new, in fact, this is my first post on this list, and I am not entirely sure I have picked the right spot to jump in tbh. I tried to think of a word for this category that fits better than difficulty, and it seems to me that the word that best captures what I understand to be the intention is something like "Barrier" as in barrier to entry. Perhaps the barrier to entry might best be read component-wise, as in Compiler-{virgin,newbie,veteren} etc? And so that could be combined into the component tag? On Thu, Nov 27, 2014 at 3:54 AM, Simon Marlow wrote:

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@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 wrote: On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 5:32 PM, Joachim Breitner 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@gmail.com ballbery@sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net

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