On 25 October 2011 03:39, Isabel Drost <[email protected]> wrote: > On 24.10.2011 Grant Ingersoll wrote: >> Docs is one obvious one. Also, just keep supplying patches. > > Speaking of supplying patches: Doing so seems non-trivial for quite some > developers. > > During the Apache Hadoop Hackathon Berlin earlier this year Jakob Homan did a > very interesting exercise: The Hadoop project seems to have bug reports that > are > trivial to fix (trivial as in typos in documentation, enhanced error messages > etc.). Jakob used those to introduce developers to the whole patch generation > and submission process during the Hackathon. > > Dan (and users of Mahout, in particular those who have not yet submitted any > patch) - do you think that having some of those bugs around (w/o a version > number assigned, maybe tagged as "trivial") help you get started with being > active contributors? How about marking issues the community feels manageable > for > newcomers as "mentor" as proposed in the Getting Started guide of > community.a.o > project: http://community.apache.org/gettingStarted/101.html ?
Oops, nearly missed this question. I think it's certainly useful to have some 'low hanging fruit' flagged. Or 'help wanted'. However 'trivial' will vary from contributor to contributor; different problems exercise different skills. You might have folk here who know the maths inside-out but are rusty with Java; or who problem with solve Hadoop-based systems on a daily basis, but are new to the algorithms. Or the likes of me, who'll maybe chase down a bug that's getting in the way of some specific task they're busy with, but lacks heavy math or hadoop background. FWIW I didn't find submitting a patch particularly difficult; https://cwiki.apache.org/MAHOUT/how-to-contribute.html is quite clear. The JIRA UI can be a little confusing if you're not used to it, but the only thing that tripped me up afaik was that I didn't realise it was OK / preferred to upload the same filename to overwrite earlier versions of a patch. cheers, Dan > Isabel > >
