Hi Katherine,
Katherine Cox-Buday <cox.katherin...@gmail.com> writes: > That last part is what I wanted to discuss, because > that's the part > that prevents me from contributing more than I do, and I think there are > probably others whom are impacted by this. Yes, I'd actually love contributing more to Guix; but even with some familiariaty with a patch-based workflow; Guix, from my perspective, resides on a higher end of effort in terms of overhead/time spend until a patch series is ready. I tend to have plenty of half-way finished/not thoroughly tested stuff on my own (local) guix channel, but wouldn't want to submit "works for me"-ish patches soliciting the attention and time of reviewers that could probably be utilized better. I don't have a particular solution for this, but I think it's important to make contributions easier, as requiring a certain time privilege as it does now doesn't seem to be feasible. Another thing to consider may be the time until a patch is being discussed/merged. I don't have any metrics for Guix, but from my experience delayed responses are usually one of the major issues on why first-time contributors don't become recurring contributors in other projects. Nix seems to address this here[1] as well. Having a tag for first time contributions, which is what nixpkgs seem to have, in debbugs/on issues.guix.gnu.org could probably be beneficial to address this issue for Guix as well. > I signed up on Savannah with the intention of applying to be a > committer. > Savannah closed my account one or two days later due to inactivity. Happened to me as well, never tried signing up again afterwards. > I don't use the email-based patch workflow day-to-day, so this is > another > area where I spend a lot of time trying to make sure I'm doing things > correctly. I feel like the advantages of a email-based workflow nowadays is more on the maintainer side of things (as managing large projects is easier using email/threaded discussions instead of the comment-based mode of discussions the MR/PR web based processes offer), as for a vast majority of potential contributors it seem to rather complicate things as most people seem to be rather used with said web-based workflow. > * It's OK to make lots of mistakes IMHO this is a pretty important point. > * We could support a managed web-based workflow This would, in addition to the email-based workflow, make at least that part of the contribution process more accessible for a larger crowd. As others have already mentioned in in this thread: sourcehut seems to be working into that direction. [1]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/showing-first-time-contributors-some-love/29105 Best Regards, Wilko Meyer
