[Help] A label to make finding issues to work on easier

[hoangtaybaokiem1993]

I’ve been trying to get started with contributing to Rust by finding issues I could work on, usually filtering by E-easy . This is difficult, however, because obviously many of these types of issue get snapped up quickly, so it’s common to see that someone else is working on it already.

I propose adding a label that can be added when someone starts working on an issue, so it’s easier to see when searching. This does create slightly more work for triage, but that’s the only disadvantage I can see here.

[Eh2406]

I tried for a long time to find E-easy to work on. I am not the fastest typer/reader. I often found that by the time I had read the background material and asked my questions someone else had a PR. At some point I overheard an offhand comment that “cargo’s resolver is just a no-go zone, no one is willing to work on it.” Looking into it, there had not been many commit to that part of Cargo in the past year and there were lots of bugs related to it that had not seen responses in a long time. I thought, they are not easy but I am not racing with anyone! It took me ~3 weeks reading the code before I understood it well enough to make a PR. That PR was far more ambitious then I realized an to ~6 weeks to get landed. (It took splitting it out into many smaller PRs that could be independently justified and reviewed.) My lived experience suggests giving up on rust-lang/rust and finding some lower profile place to contribute, then make that place where you can be (one of) the experts.

The label dose sound like a good idea.

[carols10cents]

I propose adding a label that can be added when someone starts working on an issue, so it’s easier to see when searching. This does create slightly more work for triage, but that’s the only disadvantage I can see here.

The other problem is when someone says “I’m working on this!”, the label gets added, then life happens and the person who claimed the issue isn’t able to finish and doesn’t come back to the issue to “return” it… then it doesn’t get fixed :-/ Timing out an issue if there isn’t a PR is another way to rush folks…