Low Hanging Fruit

Development
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This aims to be a post in the spirit of PRs ready for review _ and PRs already reviewed.

I often find myself with some fuel to help nix{pkgs,os,}, but no idea what to do to best use my time, without going too in-depth or taking on tasks that will cost weeks or maybe months.

The aim is to make a place for tasks that only need time contribution, and not much mental demand. Everyone can add tasks here.

  • Tasks should
    • be Low Effort, High Impact
    • have an exact scope
      • must have: current state, expected state
      • preferred to have: exact outline on what needs to be done

I hope this can be a successful effort to encourage contribution, and build an even better community.

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We have labels for that:
good-first-bug
trivial

And those PRs are often simple version bumps:
by package-maintainer

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Also just running nixpkgs-review with --post-results helps a ton.

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@riceicetea thanks for reaching out, great initiative! It may be something for the Nix documentation team to help make those worthwhile tasks more visible. So far we have only gone in that direction fairly superficially with a general contributor guide, and we have some more specific ideas for contributions to documentation which you may be interested in picking up.

Expect more of that from the documentation team in the next weeks. We recently published a call for maintainers, so what we really need are people to take some responsibility. But from that we should be able to derive more tasks that one can help with drive-by style.

Edit: Thinking about it, in a sense, roaming for things one could help out with, and figuring out how to make them more visible for others is such a task anyone can start working on immediately. If you need help to get the right people look at your things, just ping me in the given context.

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That is true, will add those links to the first post.

But, I don’t think, based on my anecdotal evidence, that most PRs are labelled.
is:pr no:label currently results 286 items (where ofborg hasn’t been yet), and frankly I don’t think anyone has enough time to add trivial and good-first-bug labels (or they simply forget)

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Hey Valentin,

  1. is nix.dev official yet? I do not think so. Recommending it to people might be a bit eh.
  2. I think that crowd-sourcing ideas here as an unofficial source is likely more productive. If the docsteam endorses something, that has to be reviewed and moderated to ensure good quality. This being unofficial is an advantage in that way.

PS:

Thanks for the kind words and approach to communication on both this topic and others in general, lately. In a space with many arguments, I respect it a lot that you can maintain such neutral-positive tone.
Probably the best communication since worldofpeace left us.

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Thank you back, a lot. After all, we’re just people flipping bits, and it’s not primarily about the bits. Feels good to be reminded.

It’s not. Read this for context. I know it’s not ideal. This is the resource we have and it’s where the people who work in this collective space meet, and that’s what matters most at the moment.

It’s more subtle than that. We have to strike a balance between centralisation (convergent thinking) and pluralism (divergent thinking). We need both, no doubt. Currently we’re mostly divergent, and this shows. I recommend throwing your ideas into the channels where those interested in the particular topics are lurking. A little bit more discipline than making new piles of disorganised information every time we feel like it already goes a long way. Let’s rather reduce the number of piles and give them more structure.

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