RFC: Fixing bugs

[Remy Blank]

Hello,

In the spirit of "learning about the internals of Trac while at the same
time doing something useful", I am trying to resolve a few simple
tickets. I would like to request comments about the following:

* Could somebody have a quick look at the following two tickets, and
comment on the proposed solutions? They seem to be simple enough that I
should manage to fix them.

http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/4021
http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/3838

* I am using the keywords defined in TracTicketTriage to try and find
tickets that I can fix. However, it is very difficult to judge how hard
it will be to fix a given ticket. Would it make sense to add a few
keywords that give an idea about the expected complexity for fixing a
ticket, something like "easy", "medium", "hard"? I would expect this to
make it easier for new people to help the project by fixing simple
tickets, and not waste time on the hard ones (at least initially).

-- Remy

[Christian Boos]

Remy Blank wrote:
> Hello,
>
> In the spirit of "learning about the internals of Trac while at the
> same time doing something useful", I am trying to resolve a few simple
> tickets.

That's perfect. In the hope that your example will be followed, I
applied the idea I proposed a while ago, which is to assign the
ownership of the ticket to the actual contributor of the patch. While
review and applying of patches still needs to be done by a team member,
this shouldn't prevent attribution of work to the person really doing it.

This way, anyone can immediately see that Remy contributed significantly
to the upcoming 0.11.1. Thanks!

> I would like to request comments about the following:
> * Could somebody have a quick look at the following two tickets, and
> comment on the proposed solutions? They seem to be simple enough that
> I should manage to fix them.
>
> http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/4021
> http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/3838

Done.

> * I am using the keywords defined in TracTicketTriage to try and find
> tickets that I can fix. However, it is very difficult to judge how
> hard it will be to fix a given ticket. Would it make sense to add a
> few keywords that give an idea about the expected complexity for
> fixing a ticket, something like "easy", "medium", "hard"? I would
> expect this to make it easier for new people to help the project by
> fixing simple tickets, and not waste time on the hard ones (at least
> initially).

The idea is appealing, however that "expected complexity" can only be a
rough indicator anyway (what will you rank? the complexity of the issue
itself, the amount of code needed, the amount of discussion and
consensus needed, etc.). Also using it in a systematic way is going to
be hard, we already have priority and severity to assess. So maybe we
can simply make a better use of the keywords we already have. I think
'helpwanted' is the most appropriate candidate keyword for tickets that
should be doable by anyone willing to contribute fixes as a way to learn
programming with Trac and/or Python.

'helpwanted' tickets combined with 'severity' (from trivial to normal)
would then be a good way for us to inform contributors about the
expected complexity of tickets, we would just have to use that when
triaging. Anything not flagged as helpwanted / (trivial, minor, normal)
could then be considered as more difficult tickets, for whatever reason
(need more knowledge, more code, more discussion, etc.).

-- Christian

>

[Remy Blank]

> > * Could somebody have a quick look at the following two tickets, and
> > comment on the proposed solutions? They seem to be simple enough that
> > I should manage to fix them.
>
> > http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/4021
> > http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/3838
>
> Done.

Thanks, that will keep me busy this evening.

> So maybe we
> can simply make a better use of the keywords we already have. I think
> 'helpwanted' is the most appropriate candidate keyword for tickets that
> should be doable by anyone willing to contribute fixes as a way to learn
> programming with Trac and/or Python.

That's a good idea. There are currently only 12 open 'helpwanted'
tickets, so
that keyword is currently not fully exploited.

Using the keyword more consequently would certainly save me a lot of
time. I have already spent several hours in the last week browsing
through tickets, trying to find the ones I could manage.

-- Remy