any solutions on what the Debian community can do to improve the new contributor experience.
Hi everyoneI've been following this thread with great interest from the very beginning and can relate to the many good points raised herein throughout.
I'll try to make a suggestion as a very new contributor to Debian myself - so take my thoughts with massive grains of salt :)
A _part_ of the problem seems to be to provide new contributors an entry point to the Debian project. Not for a lack of need of things to be done but because of difficulties in **directing new contributors to maintainers/maintainer teams who can and are willing to dedicate time to new contributors** - who, by the nature of things, will require more guidance and patience.
As Andreas has mentioned previously in this thread, these kind of mentoring opportunities exist in Debian. E.g. [0] and [1]. Probably there are more. My point is: It is hard to find them. Neither the [Debian > Get Involved][2], nor the - harder to find but more complete - [How you can help Debian][3] pages mention them.
[0]: https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/community/MoM/-/wikis/Mentoring-of-the-Month-(MoM)
[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2025 [2]: https://www.debian.org/devel/join/ [3]: https://www.debian.org/intro/helpWhile the OP of this thread managed to create a MR, many potential contributors will not even get to that point. I doubt that I personally would have started contributing to Debian if it was not for the highly structured Google Summer of Code program with a dedicated mentor. Maybe it is just me, but as a newbie it is still somewhat intimidating to contribute to a big project like Debian after all. Having an actionable "Get in touch with Mentoring Project X to start contributing to Debian" would be helpful in this situation.
Guiding potential contributors to mentors with the necessary bandwidth to support newcomers is obviously only a partial solution. Not all new contributors will need/want mentorship. It will also not help those, who want a particular bug in a particular package fixed. It will still require dedication and persistence from new contributors. But matching those who are willing to contribute with Debian Developers/Maintainers who are (explicitly) willing to be mentors feels doable.
I have a feeling that this is a more important factor in attracting new contributors than having one workflow/tool chain or another. To me, those are just another thing one might have to learn in the process of contributing to Debian.
I'd be happy to add a page on the Debian website or a wiki article listing the existing mentoring opportunities in Debian if that would help. Or does a mechanism to discover those exist already and I just haven't found it?
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