[xiphos-devel] Beginner issues (was: 4.2.0 tagged and pushed)

[Caleb Maclennan]

On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 5:31 PM Samuel Banya <sbanya at outlook.com> wrote:
> If there are any low level tickets that could be easily read and possibly looked at, let me know.

Sam,

I'm just a bystander and occasional contributor myself so this isn't
any kind of official word. but please allow me to offer a little
advice.

First it's admirable that you want to contribute. Projects this thrive
much better when there are lots of contributors. By the same token one
of the main ways they falter is a lack of participation and everything
falling on one guy to move forward.

That being said like most open source projects my guess is here that
the primary developers don't always have the time to hand-hold
contributors. If you want to make a difference you have to take some
initiative yourself. It's a lot easier to get help when you've offered
something up front than before. Even then it's not always easy, I've
had contributions to this (and many other) projects sit for years
before they were reviewed and accepted!

The other thing to note is that the only person really in a good
position to know what issues would be good for you to work on is
_you_. You know your skill set and experience. Even if I were to
search the issue set looking for possibilities I wouldn't really know
what is up your ally or not. The best thing to do is look through the
issues yourself and see if something grabs you. Even if not I'm sure
there are lots of little things you could find to fix or improve based
on your own usage. Start easy and work your way up, make sure you can
build and run it from source before you start hacking and submit
granular focused PRs with a clear objective. Maybe open issues for
things you see than need improvement to get feedback on how they
should be fixed before moving too far.

Keep in mind that other devs right now are in the middle of a big push
for a major release and overhauling some complicated old components
that are really messy work. The build issue and Webkit/GTKHTML issues
are probably not good places to start getting involved. It would
probably be appreciated if you stop hijacking threads that aren't
related. I'm sure people even without time are putting in extra effort
to get the release stuff ironed out. Having unrelated topics keep
showing up in threads probably isn't as constructive as you'd hope.

Regards,
Caleb