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Why doesn't the Kinetic Scenes repository have "good first issue" tasks?

· 2 min read
Jon-Michael Lastimosa
Jon-Michael Lastimosa
Senior Web Developer

The question: a friendlier public repository usually comes with labelled starter issues for newcomers. Should Kinetic Scenes have them, or should we just fix those things?

Context​

Launching the repository properly (Phase 23) meant a README with a demo, a one-command start, an FAQ and issue forms. The usual last step is a handful of small tasks labelled good first issue, deliberately left unfixed so a newcomer has an easy first pull request. A first draft listed six of them; three were worth doing, three were filler written to be easy.

Options considered​

  • Post starter issues and leave them for contributors: the usual way an open-source project grows contributors, but it means knowingly leaving improvements undone, and a beta that changes daily makes a newcomer's pull request likely to clash with work in progress.
  • Fix what we find, and keep issues for what others report.

Decision​

The second. GitHub issues on the repository are for problems and ideas other people report; anything we notice ourselves we fix (the three worthwhile items shipped in Studio 0.0.99: keyboard shortcuts in Help, Copy scene file, and a test suite that found and fixed a rounding edge in Reframe). The issue forms and pull-request template stay, so reports that do come in are useful.

Why​

An issue tracker is most useful as a record of what people actually run into. Filling it with tasks we could do ourselves makes it harder to see real reports, and leaves the product worse in the meantime. Starter issues can be revisited once the Studio is out of beta and the code changes less often.