So, when I decided to get involved in Gnome two and a half years ago,
I got a fair amount of advice and different directions to take on the
gnome-love mailing list. The main direction I picked at that time was
the one that had the lowest barrier to entry–bug triaging. I had
long since forgotten who suggested it (at that time, of course, I
didn’t know people in the community and names didn’t stick), but I
finally achieved his specific challenge–or at least what I
misremembered[1] his challenge to be. I just googled now to find that
original email so that I could fire off an email telling him that I
had done it. It was kind of bittersweet to see that it was Mark
Finlay that had sent
that email, since he’s not with us anymore; but it
was happy to remember all his energy and enthusiasm, and the work that
he put into Gnome.
[1] The misremembering that I had was two things: (1) thinking
“close/triage” instead of “fix” (but then again, there really hasn’t
ever been a list of top bug fixers), and (2) a switch in order of
“list” and “top” (amazing what a difference the order of two words can
make, eh? I guess it wasn’t so critical to get all those bugs closed
before the Evolution import after all…). Now, though, I think it’s
time to switch more towards “fix” instead of “close/triage”… 🙂