If you came here because you were asked to provide feedback:

Hi there! First of all I'd like to personally thank you for your contribution(s) to Black! This project is only possible by your contributions 🖤. Two, one of our top priorities is making it a good experience to contribute here. We would love to hear from you about your feedback and suggestions (context why can be found further below).

If you can please comment with your feedback and suggestions. Any sort of constructive feedback is welcomed. It can be as general as "the contributing documentation is lacking" or as specific as "on X environment, the test suite breaks", although in general the more specific and actionable the better. Bonus points if it's about the contributing documentation since I personally (as in me @ichard26) have been working on improving them lately.

Thank once again!

Context & why

Black is a popular project and probably gets a significant amount of potential contribut(ors|ions). Black is also a more mature and older project with a lot of bugs to squash so we need a fair of constant development to keep the project running smooth. One of my top concerns is that we are wasting / losing a lot of potential contributions because a poor contributing experience (fits in the general maintainability goal I've been striving for). It's not like the maintainers of this project can handle everything.

A few reasons why we might be losing potential contributions:

• Lack of good contributing documentation: yes the basics are there, but nothing else, you're left on your own for stuff like "how do I write a test?", "why are the docs structured this way?", etc.
• Difficulty with testing, linting, or other commands used during development (our requirements / environment system is currently IMO a bit of a mess)
• Poor responsiveness to issues and pull requests (this one is hard to fix but through delegation, automation, and other ideas it can be improved): it's discouraging to see your issue / pull request sit there without activity for long periods of time
• Lack of personalized support for experienced contributors: mentorship is a great way of turning a causal but somewhat experience contributor into a serious longterm contributor, but we don't provide that (and I don't think we can with our current resources) but at least providing a discussion area for maintainers and contributors to chat and ask / answer questions would be a good middle ground (the solution to this would probably be advertising the #blackformatter IRC channel a bit more)

But the thing is that I'm a maintainer so a lot of things that used to annoy me don't anymore since I got used to them. Asking contributors (especially first-time contributors!) for feedback and suggestions is better. Sooo... hence this issue.

fyi to fellow maintainers: I plan to use this issue as a place to collect feedback and suggestions as I ping contributors during the PR process