skyrocketing how-can-i-help popcon count – Bits from Debian

This is a repost from Stefano Zacchiroli’s post

how-can-i-help by
Lucas Nussbaum is one of the best things
that happened in the area of attracting contributions to Debian in quite a
while. It can be used both as a standalone tool to list opportunities for
contributing to Debian which are related to your installed packages, and as an
APT hook (which is also the default configuration) that at each upgrade will
inform you of new contribution opportunities.

how-can-i-help is great for newbies who are looking for ways to give back
to Debian which are a good match for their skills: among other things,
how-can-i-help shows
bugs tagged “gift” related to
packages you use.

how-can-i-help is also great for experienced developers, as it allows them
to find out, in a timely manner, that packages they use are in dire need of
help: RC bugs, pending removals, adoptions needed, requests for sponsor, etc.
(As highly unscientific evidence: I’ve noticed a rather quick turnover
of RFA/O/ITA bugs on packages installed on my machine. I suspect how-can-i-help
is somehow responsible for that, due to the fact that it increases awareness of
ongoing package issues directly with the people using them.)

So, if you haven’t yet, please apt-get install how-can-i-help RIGHT NOW.

I daresay that we should aim at installing how-can-i-help by default on all
Debian machines, but that might be an ambitious initial goal. In the meantime
I’ll settle for making how-can-i-help’s popcon count skyrocket. As of
today, it looks like this:

which is definitely too low for my taste. Please spread the word about
how-can-i-help. And let’s see what we can collectively do to that graph.

how-can-i-help is just a tiny teeny helper, but I’m convinced it can do wonders
in liberating dormant contributions to the Debian Project.