3 ms·

I've worried about this a little at Mozilla. We have people who get in contact looking for a first bug, and the ideal would be to say "take this exact bug" (thi

by pbiggar 16y ago

I've worried about this a little at Mozilla. We have people who get in contact looking for a first bug, and the ideal would be to say "take this exact bug" (this has a very high follow-up rate). But what happens if one person starts that bug, and then another does too. Have we scared both away? Not sure the solution here.

araneae 16y ago
...yes... cough I agree that it's not an easy problem to solve, but I'm also not sure that you want to solve it (i.e. minimize attrition). You don't want to cripple your project by collecting the maximum number of n00bs possible. For me it was more like "oh, right, I hate working with people. I can't believe I forgot that." I was just pointing out that the difficulty of collaboration might be a more significant barrier than the commenter I was replying to made it out to be.
agentultra 16y ago
You might end up with two patches. Pick the better one. Or you might end up with a patch in two days that the other person who started it has left to atrophy for two months. Not a problem really. The hardest part for a lot of new comers is literally, "Where do I start?" Not every new comer asking for a ticket is a drooling zombie hoping to trash your beautiful project with horrible undead patches.
- pbiggar 16y ago
  Yeah. I'm probably worrying too hard about this. > The hardest part for a lot of new comers is literally, "Where do I start?" I'm thinking we have a good answer for this, feedback welcome: https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Introduction https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Introduction > Not every new comer asking for a ticket is a drooling zombie hoping to trash your beautiful project with horrible undead patches. We have the opposite problem - newcomers providing patches that get lost because they didn't know to ask for review, or didn't ask the right person (also our fault really), or because we fucked up and didn't respond. We're working on this problem too - dashboards, metrics, awareness, etc, to stop it happening in the future.

by pbiggar 16y ago

araneae 16y ago

...yes... cough I agree that it's not an easy problem to solve, but I'm also not sure that you want to solve it (i.e. minimize attrition). You don't want to cripple your project by collecting the maximum number of n00bs possible. For me it was more like "oh, right, I hate working with people. I can't believe I forgot that." I was just pointing out that the difficulty of collaboration might be a more significant barrier than the commenter I was replying to made it out to be.

agentultra 16y ago

You might end up with two patches. Pick the better one. Or you might end up with a patch in two days that the other person who started it has left to atrophy for two months. Not a problem really. The hardest part for a lot of new comers is literally, "Where do I start?" Not every new comer asking for a ticket is a drooling zombie hoping to trash your beautiful project with horrible undead patches.

pbiggar 16y ago
Yeah. I'm probably worrying too hard about this. > The hardest part for a lot of new comers is literally, "Where do I start?" I'm thinking we have a good answer for this, feedback welcome: https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Introduction https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Introduction > Not every new comer asking for a ticket is a drooling zombie hoping to trash your beautiful project with horrible undead patches. We have the opposite problem - newcomers providing patches that get lost because they didn't know to ask for review, or didn't ask the right person (also our fault really), or because we fucked up and didn't respond. We're working on this problem too - dashboards, metrics, awareness, etc, to stop it happening in the future.