Re: bugzilla keyword for beginner issues to work on

Matt Rice via Gdb
2025-09-30T12:09:37Z

On Tue, Sep 30, 2025 at 11:49 AM Andrew Pinski via Binutils
<binutils@sourceware.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Sep 29, 2025 at 11:25 PM Luis <luis.machado.foss@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 29/09/2025 21:07, Andrew Pinski wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > > As talked about during the GNU tools cauldron, the gdb and gcc
> > > keywords usage here are different but folks mentioned it would be a
> > > good idea to have the same between the 2 bugzilla instances. Right now
> > > gcc is easyhack while gdb uses good-first-bug. Both have issues with
> > > the naming of each.
> > > So I was thinking of a good name and came up with beginner-improvement .
> > >
> > > I know this is all bikeshedding but in this case since the 2 projects
> > > right now use different naming we have a good chance to come up with a
> > > good name in the first place.
> > > beginner-improvement has a few advantages, first it is about being a
> > > beginner to the project. How long someone can be a beginner is up to
> > > them; it does not need to be their first issue solving. And the idea
> > > of an issue being easy is also left behind; some of them might not
> > > actually be "easy" but a beginner can still solve it.
> > > Plus in many cases it is not exactly a bug but rather than an
> > > improvement that needs to be done so this new name removes that side
> > > of things.
> > >
> > >
> > > So in summary, beginner-improvement is my proposal for the new keyword.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Andrew Pinski
> >
> > Personally I'm fine with beginner-improvement. Would we need to go
> > hunting for the old names to do the mass updates?
>
> You can rename keywords in bugzilla so there is not much to do except rename it.
> But it seems the consensus at this point of time is `good-first-issue`
> which I guess I am ok with too.
> I will wait a few more days before declaring a consensus.

I think consensus is likely to stay at something like `good-first-issue`,
it has long been in the default set of labels for github issue tracker.
In that sense it is going to tend towards being familiar outside of
the gnu project.

The rust project also uses labels for easy, medium, hard, which
give a rough estimate of the difficulty of fixing an issue. I don't care
immensely but feel like these estimates of difficulty are good too and slightly
more flexible than these beginner friendly messages...