Hi there! Reading the Debian mentors list, I read someone that didn't understand why a fix to a package wasn't included in the package, even though he provided a patch, and that it was very easy to fix.
I also remember lamby's self presentation where he explained what made him do more in Debian was that, his first action in Debian was very well received: he filed a bug report, and his patch was merged by the maintainer and included in the next Debian release. Now that we have mostly migrated everything to Salsa, it's possible to do merge requests, which save a lot of time for maintainers. It's so much faster to just click the merge button than it is to manually apply a patch, edit the changelog and what not. In OpenStack, there's a special tag for easy to fix bugs that are good fit for new comers: low-hanging-fruit. On purpose, these bugs are left open for a while without immediate action, so there can always be easy contributions left in the todo list. So I wonder if we couldn't do something similar in Debian: a low-hanging-fruit usertag (of course, another name is fine to me...), that new contributor can take care, through a merge request in Salsa. Ideally, the merge request would also automatically add the entry in debian/changelog with whatever is the first line of the patch comment, which is often considered as the tile of the patch, or Subject/Short-description. This way, package maintainer would really have nothing to do but accept the patch. Once that is all in place, then we could direct new comers to that list of bugs that they can easily fix. The Salsa part isn't mandatory, it could simply be a usertag and that's it, and I'm not volunteering for implementing the debian/changelog and merge request tweaks in Salsa. I just hope others will like my idea and that it brings more contributions. Thoughts anyone? Cheers, Thomas Goirand (zigo)
