Re: New contributor experience

[Andrey Rakhmatullin]

On Fri, Jun 06, 2025 at 06:49:38PM +0100, Richard Lewis wrote:

Consider this random new contributor's experience:

1. Go to https://www.debian.org/, click on "Get Involved, Contribute"
2. Read https://www.debian.org/devel/join/, points you to "WNPP"

Of course, this is my opinion, but it's debian's primary journey from
the homepage.

agree, it's pretty bad journey. Steps 1 and 2 should point to a wiki
page, the package tracker and/or the bts as ways to contribute for newcomers.

What wiki page?

https://wiki.debian.org/HelpDebian is the closest i have found so
far. it is lacking in specific suggestions, but seems to tick some of
the right boxes, what do you think?

Is it really better than https://www.debian.org/intro/help which I
usually use and which it already links to?

no i think https://www.debian.org/intro/help is even better than the
wiki page. but that is not listed on https://www.debian.org/devel/join/

Yes, and https://www.debian.org/devel/join/ is basically a subset of https://www.debian.org/intro/help with more focus on "joining" and packaging. That may be a bad idea but I'm definitely not qualified to decide what should be shown on the front page and what shouldn't be. For the record, https://www.debian.org/intro/help is available on https://www.debian.org/intro/index#community as the next link after https://www.debian.org/devel/join/.

i dont think either are particularly clear for newcomers. i really
struggle to understand how i can help from either to be honest.

That's because there is no easy way for someone to help, especially e.g. someone with no skills and project knowledge, when they don't already have an idea what to do.

The package tracker and/or the bts for which package?

for any package that the newcomer is interested in helping

This suggestion makes no sense to me.

my "suggestion", if you can call it that, is that historitically debian
has tried to direct people to "package something new"

Which was always a bad idea, yes. But most of the stuff like "triage bugs" is very boring, very vague or often both.

I think a better way for newcomers who want to do "development" to get
involved in debian is to pick an existing package (or team?) that they

use and help make it better.

We always suggest this, just not on the website. But it's unclear to a random user what package to pick and how to help with it, and I can imagine how would an average maintainer react to a new contributor emailing them and offering unspecified help with their package.

The package tracker and in the bts which
have a large number of "things that could be better" that no-one has
fixed but someone thought should be. By helping fix these issues it's
quite easy to get drawn into debian, and you can learn as you go. And -
i would suggest - this actually helps debian more than yet another
package.  Obviously this still depends on existing maintainers accepting
contributions, but i tihnk it's a better experience to discuss how to
fix a bug than to try and learn an esoteric packaging workflow.

--
WBR, wRAR

And this doesn't answer my question of "The package tracker and/or the bts for which package?"? How would you implement this?

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