Re: [ide-dev] Link from inside Eclipse IDE to how to contribute

[Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Oct 1, 2017 at 6:42 AM, Ed Merks <ed.merks@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

As a matter of fact, I think some of the proposals I made are simple and valuable enough for me (or maybe some teammate) to work on them in EPP with a good priority.

That's great to hear!   I think adding a link to a Contribution page on the Welcome page is an excellent idea and is most certainly an easily containable task.

I will personally not work on the Welcome Page as I do believe it's a very poor user interaction, that it's closed most of the time, rarely shown to users, not part of tutorial of or any regular workflow. Actually, the only work I'd gladly do on the welcome page one day is to remove it from EPP packages ;)

To me, the IDE would be better without this welcome page and the related "welcome" effort focused on the installation, JRE detection (or proposal), and focused menu items than on working on a page that's almost never shown.

So I will try to work on a command in EPP, a "Contribute" entry in the Help menu (which would also be included in Quick Access) first https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=525426 . That will be a first iteration.

It's good to ask up front because if you do anything that's too in-your-face (popups) it will definitely annoy people.

Once the first iteration is done, I'll bring this topic again.

I believe there can be good reasons to annoy people, if that ultimately lead them to make them happier later ;)

Disclaimer: I was really a fan of Clippy back then. It could be annoying, but it was doing a great job in a cool way!

but in the end that was deemed too disturbing

I don't think I mentioned this early (or at least not early enough), but I did really like the idea of a welcome questionnaire and how it popped-up to new users. I preferred it much more than the Welcome page or many other things.

I expect a few of us will be willing to help provide content for a contribution page when such a page is easily reachable via your proposed implementation effort.

I think the contribution page at https://www.eclipse.org/contribute/ could already be welcoming contributions to improve it. Just making it look like a "gallery" of possible contributions with some pictures to illustrate each of them could be more engaging and receive a higher clic-ration. This page can be improved via Gerrit contributions: https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/admin/projects/www.eclipse.org/contribute