Hi All, As part of my engagement with EFF and HTTPS Everywhere I reviewed Github Issues and PR with the goal of looking for quick wins and sore spots. Based on that I have put together a suggested "To Do" list. I wanted to share this with everyone here and see what you think.
Thank you! -Kate # Drive By and First Time Contributors HTTPS Everywhere has many more users than contributors, with millions of installs. In the past 2 years, 62 unique people have committed to the HTTPS Everywhere repo, though 20% have fewer than 5 commits each. While this is overall a small number of commits, all code contributors start with an initial commit. (These statistics do not count attempted initial commits where changes are requested in the pull request and when the initiator does not respond the pull request is closed.) Some first-time contributors start by submitting pull requests. Encouraging maintainers to finish pull requests, helping these initial contributors, will reduce the later work that would be required if someone created a completely new pull request to add a ruleset for a site. In order to be able to effectively do this, we need to recruit more more maintainers. A more typical first contribution is reporting an issue. Those reports generally fall into three different categories: requesting a ruleset for a site that does not have one, reporting a bug in an existing ruleset, and reporting a bug in the HTTPS Everywhere plugin itself. It would be useful to initially evaluate these tickets to determine their complexity; then, we would mark those that are relatively simple rulesets with a "New Contributor Friendly" label, the then encourage the submitter to try to develop the ruleset. If they are unresponsive, someone else can attempt it later. Currently the label "Good Volunteer Task" exists, but not a more explicit label for "New Contributor Friendly". To do: recruit maintainers find and surface "New Contributor Friendly" # Old Issues Currently, there are over 500 issues open in the HTTPS Everywhere repo, the oldest being over 4 years old. Having so many open issues makes it difficult to prioritize and sort through them. If we further develop a road map, we could close some issues and comment that they are features that aren't on our horizon. Here is a sample of some old issues that I think should be considered for closing: Issues that seem unlikely to be fixed or developed: CA Extended Validation Indication Disappears (blocking all HTTP request): https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere/issues/1004 Allow custom exclude rules: https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere/issues/296 Issues that are old and likely no longer an issue: Large issues: Some issues are huge and are likely to remain open forever. Breaking them into smaller pieces will help make the issues more approachable. Better unittest coverage: https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere/issues/427 Test and debug the HTTPS Everywhere experience in China (and other very hostile networks): https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere/issues/1000 There are other issues that are bugs that should kept open as they have been recently reverified. These issues are a sampling and there are certainly others. With further discussion and guidelines someone could go through and close other issues as well. To do: further develop roadmap close unlikely to fix issues # Discussions Discussions currently happen through GitHub issues, which only reach those people who are following every update to the repository. Discussions should be moved to the mailing list instead, to have a wider audience. Once decisions are made, each decision should be documented either as an action in a GitHub issue or through an update to documentation. To do: Move discussions to mailing list Start practice of consistently documenting decisions # Increase Number of Maintainers For most of these improvements to take place, we need to increase the number of maintainers. Currently, the role of most maintainers is to approve ruleset pull requests. More reviewers are needed to go through the existing pull request backlog, but also asking other volunteers to step up could help with some of the other issues highlighted above. To do: Personally encourage more contributors to review rulesets Signal-boost guidance on how to review and triage issues and PRs -- Kate Chapman Twitter: @wonderchook Skype: kateachapman Mobile/Signal: +1 703 673 8834
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