Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com wrote:
2011/3/23 Marcin Cieslak saper@saper.info:
One of the ways to improve this is to assign mentors to new committers. Mentors don't have to be necessarily related to the particular area of committers work. The question is how many current developers would have time to accommodate "newbies", but maybe we can work towards this idea?
I was personally going for something more like assigning reviewers to MW components, paths, time slots, or some combination thereof. But if we're gonna have that discussion for real, let's have it in its on thread :)
Yea, right, sorry for hijack. Changed subject for now. I am not sure that any formal assignement will work esp. taking volunteers into account.
I prefer to do "svn log" and see who made last few meaningful commits. In some areas it will be easy - like in the api I am most likely to see "catrope" or "reedy", but there are some forgotten swamps (like some extensions) where only raymond and firends push localization updates.
Obviously, I consider it a good practice to talk to someone touch this code earlier (as I did with CentralNotice and I didn't with API). Maybe we lack some forum for this pre-commit exchange (I think some open forum is better than private exchange on mail or even IRC channel). But sometimes things are too trivial to bother *the* mailing list (and then, wikimedia-tech seems to be more likely place since it became more developer-oriented than mediawiki-l).
Just to give a not-so-hypothetical example, since I don't like discussing in vain, what about this:
Is this okay to fix https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16260 by adding a new [[Message:qsidebar]] that is the same as [[Message:Sidebar]] only accepts EDIT, THISPAGE, CONTEXT, MYPAGES, SPECIALPAGES, TOOLBOX boxes?
I see that hartman and dartman did some work there recently, and ashley one clean up about a year ago.
//Marcin