Contribution Triage — Reaching State “Clean“

[svengreb]

With the announcement of the “Northern Post — The state and roadmap of Nord“ I was finally finished one of the largest initiatives for the Nord project that was in the making for a really long time. Now it‘s time to take the first step, one of the many that are planned.

Catching up on the backlog is a requirement to achieve a “clean state“ in all repositories in order to go on with the next steps. It‘s been a while since I had free time to focus more actual Nord tasks, and my open source projects in general, and investing time in contributions due to work-life balance and the fact that the planning and creation of the roadmap took every second of my free time that I could spare. With this being ticked of my list I‘ll go on to clean up the backlog, starting by going through all issues, pull requests and any other contribution formats.

Here, too, transparency plays an important role for me and therefore everything can be viewed in Nord‘s central “Planning & Roadmap“ project board, the single-source-of-truth for the project‘s status and plans.

Of course feedback is always welcome in this thread, but before you go ahead I want to answer some questions in advance which might occur more frequently:

• Will my contribution be accepted directly? — No, but it will be triaged and, if still relevant and you still want to continue to contribute, planned in to be processed based on the time plan with other tasks in the Nord project and criteria such as complexity, urgency and compatibility of the contribution with the current project state.
• Will my contribution be discarded if it is too old? — Of course not! The age does‘t matter as long as it is still relevant. Older contributions are even looked at first to ensure that the chronological order of the contributions are respected.
• Will my contribution be available in a new version of my favorite port soon? — It depends on criteria such as complexity, urgency and compatibility of your contribution as well as the chronological order of other contributions. To ensure that the port remains usable, “smaller“ versions are built to identify possible problems directly. When your contribution is not too complex and it can be said that it could not cause major problems, it might end up already in the next version.
• Can I withdraw my contribution? — Sure, you‘re always free to withdraw a contribution since this is open source and you are under no obligation, but note that the idea and similar changes might be brought into the project through other ways and contributions.
• Where and how can I see when my contribution will be triaged and processed? — Check out Nord‘s central “Planning & Roadmap“ project board to what‘s going on in Nord and make sure to subscribe to your issue and/or pull requests to get notified about events and changes.
• Are new contributions also accepted? — Sure! This was always the case and it won‘t change. Unfortunately, the actual triage and processing has stalled a bit, but this will be tackled now and I try my best to keep it this way.
• What happens to duplicate posts? — Based on their age, the “first“ contribution will be used as the origin, but ideas and actual changes from duplicates will be included if it fits.
• How can I help? — Right now I need to focus on the triaging process on my own, but you can, like always, watch out for possible ways to…
  • …help with issues that are already triaged in the backlog, e.g. marked to require a corresponding pull request.
  • …provide help for other users in support & help requests in Nord‘s discussions.
  • …contribute to ideas & suggestions that are discussed or submit your own.
  • …interact with the Nord community in other ways to learn to swim in the open source ecosystem.