handling of pull requests from new contributors

[David Holmes]

On 13/10/2020 4:38 am, Stuart Marks wrote:
> Hi, I wanted to mention that we're getting PRs from new contributors, 
> and they're more-or-less running into a brick wall. See this comment for 
> example:
> 
> https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/115#issuecomment-706100552
> 
>> It is insane how difficult it is to open a Pull Request for this 
>> project. I think it is bad for the Java platform, you need to attract 
>> more contributors for the project to keep it alive...
>>
>> I am stuck with the process to open a new issue, the reset link to 
>> create a new account does not work. 
> 
> Naturally, there are a bunch of issues occurring in parallel here, but I 
> think one goal would be to have sufficient material in the Guide so that 
> we can simply point new contributors to it.

We already point them to:

https://openjdk.java.net/contribute/

which is the entry point for contributors.

We have a CONTRIBUTING.md file which refers people to the link above.
Perhaps the README.md that gets displayed on github should also 
reference CONTRIBUTING.md.

Cheers,
David
-----


> (Also, when the Guide is in good-enough shape, the JDK README file 
> should have a pointer to it.)
> 
> One issue is the OCA. The bots seemed to have taken care of that 
> reasonably well, as the submitter did go through the OCA submission 
> process and the bots removed the OCA label.
> 
> A second issue, one that's currently blocking this PR, is that it's been 
> failed by jcheck because the commit message needs to refer to an issue. 
> There's no issue, so the submitter tried to create an issue. But one 
> needs an account to create an issue, so the submitter tried to create an 
> account. They found the right issue tracker (JBS) but there's no way to 
> create an account from there, and there's nothing that points them to 
> information about needing an Author role to create a JBS account, and 
> what it takes to get the Author role.
> 
> But really, what's necessary is that new contributors need to find a 
> sponsor for fixes before they can get the Author role. Frankly, I don't 
> know how to do that. I guess, ask on the mailing list?
> 
> Note that when a PR is stuck in this state, no mail is sent to any of 
> the mailing lists. I don't think that's wrong; doing so would result in 
> a lot more noise on the mailing lists. But it also means that PRs can 
> get stuck in this state and nobody is notified. For now, I've asked my 
> team to look for stale PRs. There aren't very many yet, but a handful 
> are building up and some are over a month old already.
> 
> Here's a query URL for finding PRs that have failed their checks:
> 
> https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aopen+status%3Afailure
> 
> Anyway, I'm not sure how we're tracking stuff that needs to go into the 
> Guide. (Notes in the README?) Wherever it is, these sorts of issues need 
> to be added there.
> 
> s'marks