Making It Easier To Start Working On Bugzilla

[Douglas F. Calvert]

>         1) We don't have any brief, clear documentation on the way that the
> Bugzilla Project uses Bugzilla, or what our actual development process
> is. I didn't realize this until I had to actually explain it in IRC the
> other day, and didn't have any document to refer to. :-)
>
This would also be a nice document for people interested in using
bugzilla for there own purposes; a case-study of sorts.

>         2) We don't have any way to point new contributors to the bugs that
> they should work on. It's true that we have the blockers, and that's a
> good place to start, but there are a lot of other easy bugs that would
> be a valid place to start off contributing.
>
I actually think that blockers are not the best place to start.
Blockers are important things that probably need a good deal of
attention. New developers need a little bit of hand holding as it is
and I think having a new person working on a blocker may be a bit
much. I think a good place to start would be with
trivial/enhancements. It would be nice if there was an invasiveness
keyword, so that new people could pick stuff off the periphery that
did not touch a million things.

One other thing that I have always had trouble with is that there are
not a lot of generic examples about how to do something. The source is
there, don't get me wrong I have not missed it. However adding minor
things to templates where the functionality is not already present is
a little trying sometimes. It would be nice if there was a heavily
documented template that had some examples of how to go about and do
things. Does this make any sense? For instance the other day I wanted
to change the bookmarkable template link to be the summary instead of
the generic link title. Someone fixed it way before I could figure out
how. In hind sight it was a pretty easy fix but I was unsure of how to
start it...