Hi, > > Is this really lowering the bar for new contributors? I've always held "be > > liberal in what you accept" as a gold standard for projects I'm involved > > in, to > > remove barriers to entry. Good commit messages are obviously very > > important, > > but having your patch rejected (yes, I know, failing to apply) might not be > > strongest motivator for achieving this. > > Lowering the bar for new contributors wasn't the purpose of this > change in policy. It's meant to reduce the work that committers and > reviewers have to do, which then in turn would result in quicker > reviews/commits. In my experience with other open source projects new > contributors are usually fine with adhering to project standards, if > they are told what those standards are. e.g. these days basically > every popular open source project is running a CI job that fails if > the auto-formatter fails.
I appreciate your desire to address named problems, but I don't think the proposed steps will help much. In my experience people who have been contributing for some time use format-patch and provide at least a draft of the commit message, because they know it's more convenient both for the reviewers (the patch has better chances to be reviewed and tested), and for the authors to rebase the patch after a while. Newcomers sometimes submit patches that don't even target the `master` branch, and they don't know we have cfbot. -- Best regards, Aleksander Alekseev
