Nest: Improve "Issue"-labels

[BrunnerLivio]

Feature Request

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

A lot of newcomers have trouble finding easy issues to contribute to. We should add labels which easy the process of choosing issues.

Describe the solution you'd like

I would recommend judging the issues in different dimesnions:

• Complexity
• Effort (e.g. effort2: days-label)
• "good first issue" for easy first-time contributions
• "state: has PR"-label
• Re-evaluate "PRs Open". It is quite confusing for a lot of contributors what this label actually means. In my opinion, it should be removed or renamed.

[kamilmysliwiec]

"state: has PR"-label

Sounds great.

Re-evaluate "PRs Open". It is quite confusing for a lot of contributors what this label actually means. In my opinion, it should be removed or renamed.

"PRs Open" means that we're looking for contributions (the feature/functionality/enhancement is ready to tackle). What would you propose instead?

"good first issue" for easy first-time contributions

I'm actually using this already, but most of the existing issues are not good (easy) for newcomers.

Complexity Effort (e.g. effort2: days-label)

I don't think that these two bring any actual benefit. They would (very likely) work well for bigger teams in which multiple people are working on the project concurrently. However, in this case, even if I set, let's say "effort2: days" to certain issue, it won't necessarily mean that someone else can finish it in "days". Similarly, what "days" mean in particular? In projects where everyone is working full-time, we could assume that "day" is roughly 8 hours. What would this mean for OSS?

[BrunnerLivio]

Thanks for your response @kamilmysliwiec

"PRs Open" means that we're looking for contributions (the feature/functionality/enhancement is ready to tackle). What would you propose instead?

I think every PR is open for the community, so I do not think we need this label at all.
I think we should introduce labels inspired by Angular, to clarify whether an issue is taken by which role:

• state: community: Someone from the NestJS community is working on this issue or submitted this PR
• state: core-team: Someone from the NestJS core team is working on this issue or submitted this PR.

Therefore, if no state: *-label is present, it is open for contributions and no instance has started working on it.

I don't think that these two bring any actual benefit.

The motivation behind this label is to let contributors know how much time the core team expects this issue will take. As a contributor it is sometimes hard to assess how complex or time consuming a task will be. A label which indicates the complexity or time consumption would help with that assessment.

In projects where everyone is working full-time, we could assume that "day" is roughly 8 hours. What would this mean for OSS?

I would go for 8 hours/day too. It is just a rough estimate by one of the core team members (e.g. hours, days, weeks) how much time the contributor will approximately need to invest

I would categorize this label as "nice-to-have", so if you think it is not worth the effort or too time consuming for the core team, then I am ok with that :)

[marcus-sa]

The severity or priority labels would be a great addition.

[boenrobot]

I think every PR is open for the community, so I do not think we need this label at all.

Well, sure, but there are some features which would be outright rejected for one reason or another, and one may not realize that until they've already made the feature without reading the whole discussion, so IMHO, having a label that says "this has been discussed and we would like to have it indeed, but can't spare the time to make it, so if you'd like to contribute, go ahead, we'll accept it" is nice.

That said, I agree the name "PRs Open" sounds very misleading.

"PRs Open" means that we're looking for contributions (the feature/functionality/enhancement is ready to tackle). What would you propose instead?

I think a name like "PRs Welcomed" would explain the purpose better.

I've been reading some issues with the label "PRs Open" and thought that means "There is one or more opened PR for this issue, waiting to be reviewed later", but only now I realize that's not what the name "PRs Open" means.

With labels like complexity/effort, I also agree having even a rough time estimate isn't really a good idea, as developers (in general) are notorious for underestimating the time required. I think more generic values like "trivial", "low", "medium" and "high" might be better.