[Python-Dev] Helping contributors with chores (do we have to?)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Tue Jun 27 07:32:10 EDT 2017


On 27 June 2017 at 07:49, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Jun 2017 at 01:34 Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
>> So we have to rely on contributors to make the PR
>> merge-ready by themselves... which means spending some time guiding
>> them through the oh-so-exciting steps necessary to add the right
>> Misc/NEWS entry,
>
> My hope is that having a news entry status check through Bedevere with help
> with that. I'm also open to ideas on how to make it more obvious to
> first-time contributors that things need to be done, e.g. maybe a default PR
> message that is nothing more than "<!-- FIRST-TIME CONTRIBUTORS: make sure
> to visit the CONTRIBUTING link above as CPython deviates from typical GitHub
> practices. -->" (making it an HTML comment means it won't' ever show up in
> the rendered output of the PR, plus that comment is short and thus easy to
> ignore)? We could also make the CONTRIBUTING.md file have a bullet-point
> list of the key things we expect people to do that is different from most
> projects. (The only other thing I can think of is a comment for first-time
> contributors pointing all of this out, but I'm leery of that as all of our
> bots are stateless and this would make at least Bedevere stateful.)

This reminded me of another relevant option for contributors making
their first drafts of NEWS entries: they/we can take an existing NEWS
snippet like https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Misc/NEWS.d/next/Core%20and%20Builtins/2017-06-26-14-29-50.bpo-30765.Q5iBmf.rst,
save it under an appropriate filename, and then edit the content.

To be honest, I suspect that's how I'll end up writing most of my own
NEWS entries rather than using blurb to generate them :)

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia


More information about the Python-Dev mailing list