Help contribute to pipenv -- new Contributor Candidate label

[matteius]

Welcome to Mid-June 2022! For myself, this marks 7 months using the pipenv project and about 4 months of serving as an active maintainer for the project along with @oz123. In that time a lot has been accomplished building upon the accomplishments of @frostming and other prior maintainers and code authors. We have made big strides in terms of understanding the backlog of issues reports, solving for bugs and enhancing many areas of the codebase. In the 1-year time frame, approximately 425 pipenv issues have been closed out and current backlog is about 430 issues.

One thing that has become completely clear: not only is it important to be be receiving new issue reports from the community--it is equally important to continue encouraging and accepting contributions from the community as well. It is quite impossible for a handful of volunteers to consider and fix everything for thousands of users. However pipenv is a development tool for Developers which means not only do we support a wide range of systems and use cases, but we also have the know how to make contributions in various forms toward improving the tooling.

In order to help facilitate making it easier for new and existing contributors to look for impactful issues I want to remind you of some existing ticket labels as well as a new label Contributor Candidate

• triage - This label indicates the issue report has been parsed but that some amount of triaging/validation of the error report needs to take place so that it can be further classified. Anyone can help do this.
• Contributor Candidate - This label is new and indicates that the issue report is well formulated and will require some kind of code contribution to accomplish it. We can assign out this issues and remove the candidate label once someone begins working on a prototype change.
• Status: Awaiting Update ⏳ - This label indicates that a question or request for more information has been made from a primary participant in the thread. Prolonged lack of response is sometimes a valid reason for closing this type of issue.

Other helpful labels that give context to the ticket:

• Type: Documentation 📖 - This issue has identified a need for an enhancement to our documentation. The docs are built with Sphinx and improvements can be verified locally in isolation. Follows same PR process as making other code changes.
• Type: Question ❔ - This is a request for support or a potential question about pipenv.
• Type: Bug 🐛 - This label is reserved for a confirmed regression or obvious bug in pipenv. Ideally these get fixed in relatively short order.
• Type: Possible Bug - This type of issue has been triaged to a certain extent and it is believed a bug may exist, but additional details are required to make determination. These generally require additional insights, triaging and potential code change before a resolution can be made.
• Type: Enhancement - These are enhancement requests. Not all enhancement requests will be worth implementing; many haven't been fully considered and may require additional refinement to proceed. The ones marked as Contributor Candidate are believed to be worth pursuing, but many simply haven't been tagged with this new label yet.

There are other status related labels as well to help track the state of the backlog. Thank you for all of you that have contributed and continue to contribute to pipenv in the form of Issue reports, Pull Requests and Discussions! Whether you are a veteran developer looking to improve a subtle edge case, add a feature or you are more junior looking to get some experience contributing to open source: with your help, I am optimistic that we can reduce the number of active and requested issues in half again by this time next year (which would be ~200 issues or less). Thank you for taking the time to read this post and we welcome any constructive feedback to help improve our processes further.