Re: How can we decrease the cognitive overhead for contributors?

[Wilko Meyer]

Hi Katherine,

Katherine Cox-Buday <cox.katherine.e@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