[kwlug-disc] FLOSS contributions

[Marius Kintel]

Hi Paul,

Hard questions.
Developer docs are sparse, since it little motivation in writing good docs if nobody reads them. Updating docs is something we try to do when actually needed, or try to encourage people to write down their experiences for doc contribution purposes. Most of this is normal stuff though, so it shouldn’t pose a problem for software professionals. It’s a bit harder for hobbyists or students with little professional experience.

The most successful first contributions are fixing existing bugs, missing tests, documentation or examples or build system tweaks, as they don’t really require any design discussions.

We do have reasonable patience, but as I work on my project mostly on my spare time, it can take days to be able to meaningfully respond to emails. The same goes for other community members. Hand holding tends to work best on IRC. 
The largest risk is that the final contribution isn’t suitable for merging, for various reasons (code quality, feature not designed well enough, feature introducing ambiguity or conflict with other features or other planned features, lack of testing). Some people know that there is a chance that written code will not be used and are comfortable with that. Others lose motivation really fast.
Most unsuccessful larger contribution attempts fail since there isn’t time to do a proper design of the suggested feature (partially since core devs are too busy to engage in a large design discussion when there are more pressing issues).

Cleanup and refactoring work do require decent knowledge of the project. Contributing to the core of a project is, ideally, a long term commitment due to the time required to get into the project. Think about it as onboarding as a new software developer in a company - that’s not done over night either..

Hope that helps,

 -Marius

> On Aug 17, 2016, at 01:47, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc <kwlug-disc at kwlug.org> wrote:
> 
> That is helpful information. Thank you! Now I have more questions:
> 
> How easy is it for potential contributors to pick up the right way to
> make useful contributions? Are the procedures necessary to complete
> the other 80% of the job well understood/documented, or are they only
> in the heads of the developers?
> 
> How much patience/energy do the developers have towards handholding
> potential contributors through completing the other 80% of the work? 
> 
> How feasible is it for outsiders (who are neither core developers nor
> the people proposing features) to do this kind of cleanup work? Does
> this stuff require a lot of in-depth knowledge of the project, or is
> it rote enough that somebody who is not expert enough to code a new
> feature can do the cleanup?
> 
> - Paul