Re: bugzilla keyword for beginner issues to work on

Jeff Law via Gdb
2025-09-30T21:08:00Z

On 9/29/25 2:07 PM, 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.
I'm not going to bikeshed on the name :-)

But I would suggest we generally indicate why we're adding the tag to
any given bug.

For example I might see a bug reported against the SH which I think may
be painful to fix on the SH due to characteristics of its architecture,
but the bug may still show up on say RISC-V with a clear path to fixing
on that ISA.

One might argue I should create another bug (and sometimes I have done
that). But I wouldn't be surprised if we found that over time ideas to
fix on one ISA may be relevant to approaches taken on others and the like.

So I'm in general agreement on finding a consistent way to tag these
things and would really like those of us who scour BZ to record thoughts
if we think some of these are junior engineer applicable (and to be
clear, I'm certainly guilty of adding a personal tag without indicating
why I added that personal tag for educational BZs).

jeff