2017-12-08 17:19 GMT+01:00 Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti@gmail.com>:
Aha. Maybe we need some tooling, like statistics on contributions to the bug tracker, just to detect earlier active "bug triagers"?
This can be done (e.g. the famous highscores page we have been talking about).
My opinion on such statistics is that they must not be public. I don't want to reward the highest number of contributions. As I wrote in the process documentation, what matters is the quality and kind of the contributions, and also the commitment.
But a private tool, only accessible to core dev for example, would easy the work of identifying active contributors.
There are however other triagers that just go through the issues and adjust fields or comment, even if they have no intention of working on the issue itself. While it's technically true that there might be people that want to triage but not contribute code, most of them do contribute, and triage while going through the issues.
Hum, as Ned Deily wrote, some people don't want to become core developers and are fine to contribute as regular contributors. I should clarify this in the document.
By the way, since the migration to Git and GitHub, contributing without being a core dev became simpler IMHO.
My hope is that many contributors are potential core developers but were stuck somewhere, and failed to get the right documentation or mentor to unblock them.
This is a good point, but indeed, how many are contributing with the goal and hope of becoming core devs? How many are contributing because they like the project, and would be happy to become core devs? How many are just scratching a itch but otherwise have no desire to contribute to other aspects of the project? Finding an answer to these questions might help understanding where are the problems that need to be addressed.
Ow, these are tricky questions! Maybe a poll sent to contributors, or to python-dev, would help?
Victor