"Claiming" tickets

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In an open-source project with hundreds of contributors around the world, it's

important to manage communication efficiently so that work doesn't get

duplicated and contributors can be as effective as possible. Hence, our policy

is for contributors to "claim" tickets in order to let other developers know

that a particular bug or feature is being worked on.

If you have identified a contribution you want to make and you're capable of

fixing it (as measured by your coding ability, knowledge of Django internals

and time availability), claim it by following these steps:

* `Create an account`_ to use in our ticket system.

* If a ticket for this issue doesn't exist yet, create one in our

`ticket tracker`_.

* If a ticket for this issue already exists, make sure nobody else has

claimed it. To do this, look at the "Assigned to" section of the ticket.

If it's assigned to "nobody," then it's available to be claimed.

Otherwise, somebody else is working on this ticket, and you either find

another bug/feature to work on, or contact the developer working on the

ticket to offer your help.

* Log into your account, if you haven't already, by clicking "Login" in the

upper right of the ticket page.

* Claim the ticket by clicking the radio button next to "Accept ticket"

near the bottom of the page, then clicking "Submit changes."

.. _Create an account: http://www.djangoproject.com/accounts/register/

Ticket claimers' responsibility

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Once you've claimed a ticket, you have a responsibility to work on that ticket

in a reasonably timely fashion. If you don't have time to work on it, either

unclaim it or don't claim it in the first place!

Core Django developers go through the list of claimed tickets from time to

time, checking whether any progress has been made. If there's no sign of

progress on a particular claimed ticket for a week or two after it's been

claimed, we will unclaim it for you so that it's no longer monopolized and

somebody else can claim it.

If you've claimed a ticket and it's taking a long time (days or weeks) to code,

keep everybody updated by posting comments on the ticket. That way, we'll know

not to unclaim it. More communication is better than less communication!

Which tickets should be claimed?

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Of course, going through the steps of claiming tickets is overkill in some

cases. In the case of small changes, such as typos in the documentation or

small bugs that will only take a few minutes to fix, you don't need to jump

through the hoops of claiming tickets. Just submit your patch and be done with

it.