QtCS2021 - Improve the contributor experience

Session Summary

Back in 2019 we had the discussion around the contribution experience, from which we gather many good ideas: some of them were never addressed, but others have been implemented, like for example the Qt project website and the Community Manager position that was open.

This session will try to address many of the open topics we had from that session looking at "What we could do" to keep improving the experience in topics like:

• What we can learn from the KDE contribution experience
• First contribution and initial setup
• Gerrit improvements, plugins, etc
• Creation of "good first issues" in JIRA
• ...and all the good ideas you probably have.

Update: Together with Eddy, we had a session on how to contribute to Qt, I recommend you to quickly check the slides (there are some videos with audio in the middle), so you can get some ideas on steps we could improve: https://qtinfo.dev/akademy2021_contribute/

Session Owners

• Cristián Maureira-Fredes (cristian.maureira-fredes@qt.io)

Notes

(Taken by kakoehne)

Feedback on https://qt-project.org

• Information is pretty 'crammed'. More overview documentation?
  • No 'why' part. _Why_ would I want to contribute?
  • Have separate page for the motivational part & link to it?

First time contribution experience

• Getting started is still pretty complicated
  • Creation of accounts (Qt Account, Gerrit account ...)
  • People gt lost
• Getting start with contribution needs simplified guide
  • Isn't that https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_Contribution_Guidelines ?
    • "Qt Contributing Guidelines" doesn't seem like the name that the Wiki page you would start with as an absolute newbie should have IMO.
  • Wiki is full of (half) outdated pages, should be cleaned up
• Split up between wiki information and https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/build-sources.html and https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/build-sources.html
  • Avoid redundancy!
• Reduce 'How to contribute' on https://qt-project.org to just a link?
  • Current list is not complete, and not too helpful for first-time contriburs
• Configuring and building Qt is complicated (like it is for KDE)!
  • https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/build-sources.html / https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/build-sources.html is pretty good though
• https://wiki.qt.io/How_to_Create_Qt_Account
  • This is partially duplicating 'Setting up Gerrit'
  • How_to_Create_Qt_Account is more graphical though
  • Interlink?
• More graphical instructions!
  • See animated gif at https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_for_Python

Gerrit

• Can we improve gerrit experience?
  • codereview.qt-project.org is already 2 versions behind upstream
  • 'Find reviewer' plugin?
    • https://gerrit.googlesource.com/plugins/maintainer/
  • Have we checked with other communities?
    • Check with other gerrit users, like libreoffice?
    • KDE Experience with move from fabricator to gitlab was very positive
      • Much better known workflow
    • Gerrit command line always feels a bit weird (git push <to strange branch>)
      • This is at the core of gerrit though; user base
• Feedback from first time users
  • Usage of bots are not obvious; what to do when it claims stuff?
  • Existence of CI; flow should be better visualized
  • Whom to add to a reviewer?
  • All explained somewhere in the guidelines, but not really self-explainatory
• Accept contributions also from github?
  • Aim is to have one process for everyone!
  • gitlab/gerrit integration bridge (https://gerrithub.io)?
    • Still requires learning gerrit for non-trivial commits (commit series)

Move to Github/Gitlab?

• What's stopping us?
  • Check with other communities

(Notes by Aleix Pol)

JIRA

• Seems quite okay
• Would it be possible to have shared filters? Quick links?
• TODO Create an issue to have certain filters installed by default
• Prioritization a bit off?
• Logging in
  • It's a bit hard to see if you're logged in
  • You don't get back to where you were after logging in

Communications

• We have Matrix bridges for the qt-cs channel, we should have also for the other relevant channels to the Qt Project
  • We could consider making the KDE matrix instance an official way to join our channels.
• Mailing lists
  • We are not using the last version of mailman and it looks a bit old. Updating could be nice.