[sugar] New developers... how to place them?

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Fri, 2007-03-23 at 02:11 -0400, Mike C. Fletcher wrote:
> As I start the developer outreach work I'm getting (quite a few) 
> developers asking me the question:
> 
>     Where should I work within the project.
> 
> and I'm coming up against the question of how I can know what the 
> project priorities/needs are.  Over time I will hopefully become 
> pseudo-omniscient (work on that later ;) ) but in the meantime I'm 
> tossing around some ideas.
> 
> So far my answers are of the character:
> 
>     * We desperately need documentation
>           o Mel is beginning work on that with Marco now
>     * We desperately need (documented) sample code for:
>           o Hippo, particularly for activities, particularly more
>             advanced layouts showing both how and *why*
>           o Telepathy, we need sample code for "how to share activity
>             state among multiple participants"
>           o Hardware access from Python (for all special hardware)
> 
> and I *think* those answers are probably the right answers *today* (and 
> there's more in the wiki on the developer's images pages), but that's 
> all just *me* thinking up what needs to be done.  What I need to be 
> effective is requests from the various project leads, things like:
> 
>     * We need someone to build an X activity with an associated set of
>       simple experiments
>     * We need someone to document X API(s) or processes
>     * We need someone to figure out how to do X
>     * We need someone to run X subproject, they need to be able to do
>       this, that and the other thing
> 
> If at all possible, some prioritisation would be helpful (is this 
> blocking your project, going to speed it up, or just a nicety).  I'll 
> probably look into getting such things posted to a wiki page somewhere 
> (or maybe something with an RSS feed).
> 
> Or does someone have a better idea?  Project-wide ticket-tracker for 
> "hiring"?  Simple mailing list with announces of needs and offers?
> 
> There are thousands of developers willing to work, where do we need them 
> tomorrow,

Just brainstorming:

* I think we should come up with very specific tasks rather than with
large sub-projects. That's usually a much better entry point to
understand the code base and the platform. (Maybe we should do both but
you get what I mean...)

* We tried to do this with track before. There is still a list of
tickets but... it has not been well maintained recently:

http://dev.laptop.org/query?status=new&status=assigned&status=reopened&keywords=%7Esugar-love&order=priority

Maybe something on the wiki would be easier for people to look at,
unsure.

* I'm totally swamped by Trial1 work right now but I'd love to
contribute to this. I'll try to get some time in the weekend to post
ideas.

* I think it would be good to have some brainstorming by the community
on what needs to be fixed in Sugar, both from an user and developer
point of view. If done constructively, I think it might actually be an
excellent start point to write down tasks for contributors.

Marco