LilyPond Contributor's Guide: 1.3 Mentors

## 1.3 Mentors

We have a semi-formal system of mentorship, similar to the medieval “journeyman/master” training system. New contributors will have a dedicated mentor to help them “learn the ropes”.

Note: This is subject to the availability of mentors; certain jobs have more potential mentors than others.

### Contributor responsibilities

1. Ask your mentor which sections of the CG you should read.
2. If you get stuck for longer than 10 minutes, ask your mentor. They might not be able to help you with all problems, but we find that new contributors often get stuck with something that could be solved/explained with 2 or 3 sentences from a mentor.
3. If you have been working on a task much longer than was originally estimated, stop and ask your mentor. There may have been a miscommunication, or there may be some time-saving tips that could vastly simply your task.
4. Send patches to your mentor for initial comments.
5. Inform your mentor if you’re going to be away for a month, or if you leave entirely. Contributing to lilypond isn’t for everybody; just let your mentor know so that we can reassign that work to somebody else.
6. Inform your mentor if you’re willing to do more work – we always have way more work than we have helpers available. We try to avoid overwhelming new contributors, so you’ll be given less work than we think you can handle.

### Mentor responsibilities

1. Respond to questions from your contributor(s) promptly, even if the response is just “sorry, I don’t know” or “sorry, I’m very busy for the next 3 days; I’ll get back to you then”. Make sure they feel valued.
2. Inform your contributor(s) about the expected turnaround for your emails – do you work on lilypond every day, or every weekend, or what? Also, if you’ll be unavailable for longer than usual (say, if you normally reply within 24 hours, but you’ll be at a conference for a week), let your contributors know. Again, make sure they feel valued, and that your silence (if they ask a question during that period) isn’t their fault.
3. Inform your contributor(s) if they need to do anything unusual for the builds, such as doing a “make clean / doc-clean” or switching git branches (not expected, but just in case...)
4. You don’t need to be able to completely approve patches. Make sure the patch meets whatever you know of the guidelines (for doc style, code indentation, whatever), and then send it on to the frog list or -devel for more comments. If you feel confident about the patch, you can push it directly (this is mainly intended for docs and translations; code patches should almost always go to -devel before being pushed).
5. Keep track of patches from your contributor. If you’ve sent a patch to -devel, it’s your responsibility to pester people to get comments for it, or at very least add it to the google tracker.

#### LilyPond — Contributor’s Guide