I just tried using our easyfix page to find an issue that would be a good first issue for a programmer to get used to contribute to open source. All three issues that I considered have problems that make me believe that the current collection is not helping that much. Basically, the problem is that the projects are not curated enough. Besides having issues that are good documented and easy to address, also the project needs to be ready to receive them.
Here are my examples:
Add -v, --version option to fedora-business-cards
This sounds like a great first issue, clear task, easy to achieve. Now looking a the issues, the problems are:
- the task is already assigned to someone
- there was already a patch posted for this a year ago: PR#11: Added version flag in cli - fedora-business-cards - Pagure.io
- the PR received some comments and does not seem to be sufficient but is still open
So this leads to the questions: - Is the project still maintained? What is expected from a new contributor at this point? Do they first need to ask if someone is still working on this?
IMHO, if this is still a valid easyfix, the issues should be unassigned, the PR should be closed and there should be a comment by the maintainer about the state
RFC: Extend max-line-length from 80 to 88+ (100?) in freeipa
Again, a trivial issue, nice task for someone to do something
- again, issue is already assigned to someone
- there is a PR: tox.ini: Extend max-line-length from 80 to 88+ by fcami · Pull Request #5198 · freeipa/freeipa · GitHub (about a year old)
- The PR is closed, the PR was closed as stale. The last comment on the PR might indicate that they decided not to move forward but it only lists the votes, no clear statement about the outcome.
Again, this issue is not curated, it should not be there.
Report rpmlint version used for checks in taskotron/task-rpmlint
- looks like a nice issue
- I am wondering if this is easy enough to get started, checking for contribution guidelines/recent activity
- Issue #20: Report rpmlint version used for checks - task-rpmlint - Pagure.io states: “THIS PROJECT IS NOW UNMAINTAINED.”
Now I am frustrated. Maybe there are some issues in there, that are good first issues but these were the three first issues that I checked and looked like possible candidates at all. So IMHO, if we want to promote tasks/projects, there needs to be some regular vetting for the projects to make this a benefit.