Beginner friendly issues

[avivace]

Hi! If you want to begin contributing to RGBDS—first of all, thank you!—we try to tag issues that are easier for beginners to tackle: search for the "good first issue" tag!

Original post below.

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Hi, fellow RGBDS contributors and enthusiasts,

I'd like the @gbdev/rednex team to help me in flagging some beginner friendly issues: tasks that can help join the project and let people familiarise with our tools while contributing. I've created a "beginner-friendly" label you can use.

If you open new issues or split the existing ones in more "attackable" and easy issues it's good, too!

I'm looking for easy to understand tasks that can be carried out without having too much context (e.g. QoL, fixes, documentaiton, ...).

I'm asking you this for the following reasons:

• Hacktoberfest is coming, and every year it attracts a lot of quality contributions and traffic. This could be useful to get more people involved and interested in our projects.
• I'm planning to investing some of the donations we are getting as gbdev community to promote the development of our projects. Having some good issues to put rewards on would be fantastic!
• We now have a RGBDS website and expanding out outreach is definitely something we should look forward to.

[ISSOtm]

Ouch, this is actually something I feared. I think that the main problem with almost every issue is the lack of docs on how the code is structured. Based on that, I'm reluctant to mark any issue as "beginner-friendly", as all that require touching the code have that implicit barrier of entry of actually understanding the code.
We should write the docs ourselves, but that'll take some time, and mine is going to get a severe cut starting next week.

Non-"code" issues are essentially auxiliary stuff like #469, so that wouldn't contribute where it matters.

Dunno, really. I'm torn.

[AntonioND]

Yeah, the only things I can think of are things like testing, or making the documentation prettier. It was pretty tricky to start doing things in this codebase but, at least, there were quite a few small tasks to do back then.

As long as #485 is open, most small things are blocked.

[JL2210]

List of somewhat beginner-friendly issues:

• Incorrect documentation of symbol and section types #565
• newcharmap documentation #558 (if choosing the "change documentation" route)
• Use develop in tests #469
• Getting make develop to work with Clang and different GCC versions #283
• Improve tests and testing infrastructure #151, maybe?

[AntonioND]

#151 for sure, and I think it would be useful to have regression tests...

[ISSOtm]

Maybe it'd be worth merging #557 in its current state, then? I don't think it's too bad in its current state anyways, mostly fairly minor issues. Proper string management would be good, though...

[AntonioND]

Well, I don't think it's a crazy idea, for sure. Maybe we could tag a new version right now, merge that PR afterwards, and fix issues as they come up before the next tag.

[AntonioND]

I will take a look at the PR tonight.

[AntonioND]

This one should be easy, though: #573

And useful for mac users.

[ISSOtm]

Note: it's also imperative to run the tests and code style checks on PRs. Currently, checkpatch is broken...

[JL2210]

We should make an issue for that and see if a beginner can fix it

[ISSOtm]

Given the trouble I'm having with it, probably not. Besides, it'd block everything else, so not worth it.

[ISSOtm]

As far as my testing goes, 6528a95 made checkpatch work again. We'll see on the next PR opened, I guess.

[ISSOtm]

The issue itself has been resolved, so closing. I'll be keeping it pinned in the issues tab, so it will stay accessible nonetheless.

[avivace]

The issue itself has been resolved, so closing. I'll be keeping it pinned in the issues tab, so it will stay accessible nonetheless.

If beginner issues keep being tracked with a label, it's not even necessary to keep this pinned.

[ISSOtm]

A beginner coming to this page may not think that such a label exists, so I edited this issue's top post to link to the search criterion for it.

[avivace]

A beginner coming to this page may not think that such a label exists, so I edited this issue's top post to link to the search criterion for it.

Great, okay.

[ISSOtm]

Linking to from here, as it may be appropriate: https://matklad.github.io/2024/03/22/basic-things.html