[IPython-dev] Introduction to contributing to IPython

[Thomas Kluyver]

On 26 February 2012 02:01, Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com> wrote:
> Mmh, it's unfortunately true that we've done a poor job with
> organizing small, newcomer-friendly tasks.  The big event I had of
> this kind was in India, and because of this problem I ended up
> directing most people to just do docstring fixes in magics.  This
> isn't necessarily a bad idea, BTW, for people who may be completely
> new to the github worfklow, as it's pretty safe and leads to very easy
> to review requests.  So you should keep it in mind as an option in
> case you have some absolute newbies in the group.  But for more
> experienced developers, just fixing a docstring isn't really too
> interesting...

My current thinking is to get each group to attempt to fix one of the
quickfix bugs from the issue tracker. This will take them through the
workflow of forking, branching, committing changes and submitting a
pull request, but with something a bit more meaty than changing a
docstring. Hopefully there'll also be time to add a test for each
issue.

Brief thoughts on the other ideas:

- Reviewing pull requests: I may get people doing this if there's
spare time at the end, but I think it's less satisfying, as there's
only so much you can say without being familiar with the codebase.
- Notebook export/Selenium/PRbot: I think you'd need to know the
relevant architecture to make much headway with these during the
meeting. My experience is that the time goes by very quickly, and
there'll be an overhead for getting set up with the repository,
virtualenv, etc.
- Test tagging: something else that I may well hold in reserve.

Thanks,
Thomas