Re: improving our contributing tools and workflow

[David Kastrup]

Joseph Rushton Wakeling <address@hidden> writes:

> Now, I'm not assuming that no one has ever done this.  I rather
> imagine it's been tried and that the resulting workload (probably
> mostly Graham's) has been overwhelming and that in fact there is no
> guarantee that it pays off in terms of another long-term contributor
> -- so people have been discouraged from this approach by hard
> experience.  But I still think that it's possible to approach
> contributors with enthusiastic caution rather than lowered
> expectations, which are demoralizing for everyone.

Well, you think that it's better to demoralize existing developers
rather than hypothetical would-be contributors nobody knows.

How many patches would you expect to be contributing per month to
LilyPond when it would use the code management systems you prefer?

> FWIW I think automated testing of pull requests is helpful here
> because test failures are impersonal and encourage the contributor to
> pro-actively sort out the problems in their code without having to be
> told -- there's not the same sense of personal rejection.

We have automated tests of contributions already.  Before telling
everybody how to do everything better, how about making yourself
acquainted with how we are doing things?

Perhaps easiest done by contributing a few patches to the lists in the
manner you like, and see what progress they make through the system?

-- 
David Kastrup