As of a few weeks ago, bugzilla has a "mentor" field which is being used to identify bugs that are good for new contributors to work on and the correct person to mentor them. It would certainly make sense for someone looking to work on a bug with no suggested mentor to ask for one. If you have any suggestions for how to make this work well in the UI, it would be good to hear; expecting people to notice "this bug doesn't have a mentor field so I should ask for one" seems rather unlikely to work.

The bug that you worked on was a bit of an outlier in the sense that:

* It modified relatively complex parts of the code. * There was initially no (HTML) spec for the feature. * There was initially insufficient information to know what the spec for the feature ought to say.

So I think a mentor might well have told you "this is not a good first bug". Of course that make it all the more impressive that you pushed through the difficulties and got the patch landed and the spec fixed along the way. Thank you for that! The main delays seem to have been waiting for review, which a mentor may or may not have been able to help with depending on whether there were other less-busy qualified reviewers, and waiting for the patch to land, which these days we have a better process for and so which wouldn't happen again.

I asked around on IRC after the fact; it was generally agreed that I should have requested other reviewers rather than waiting months for feedback. If only I'd known!

But that's kind of my point. "Mentored bugs" is an interesting approach, but normally people have mentors, not bugs, and I think that having a "mentor/mentee" field on user profiles may be the right approach for Mozilla; the field would show up on comments/patches I post.

That way, the reviewer could have seen on my profile that I'm new to fixing Mozilla bugs and unmentored, and in his first review, he could have suggested, "I think you should fix these things, and BTW, I think you should find a mentor to shepherd you through this process."