Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: chad <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2014 16:43:03 -0800
> 
> 
> On 18 Feb 2014, at 07:31, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> > 
> >>> Incidentally, I say "change" and not "patch". Submitting a change these
> >>> days generally means "clone, branch, pull request".
> >> 
> >> Sorry, I don't understand the subtlety.
> > 
> > I think it's a paraphrase of "real developers use GitHub", a service
> > running on proprietary software and having a variety of commercial
> > offerings, including a rather popular "take it or leave it" zero
> > pricetag offering.
> 
> I think it’s a paraphrase of “lots of developers are used to a model where 
> they submit changes that are taken, with or without modification, rather than 
> a process whereby they suggest a change and then begin a dialog”. Github is 
> definitely one of the promulgators of this model, but it’s certainly not the 
> only one.
> 
> Without digging into real data (sorry), I’d say that around 33-50% of the 
> changes submitted to emacs-devel from new people don’t land, either because 
> of explicit rejection or because the effective hurdle is high enough that 
> people don’t get over it. I’d further say that at least half of those 
> failures to land result from platform-specific issues.  There are good 
> reasons for the policies that create these hurdles, but they surely make it 
> much harder for people to start working on emacs, even compared to other 
> free/libre software projects.

So you are saying that patch review process is that "red tape" that
was mentioned earlier?  If so, all the projects I'm involved with
insist on the "dialog", i.e. that the original contributors improve
and fix their contributions until they are acceptable.  Which projects
don't?

Of course, volunteers are welcome to help with that, i.e. pick up such
patches and rework them into acceptable state.  Because so far the
number of people who do that is countable on a single hand.  Given
that, you cannot expect those people to also do the reworking, even if
they thought this was the way to go.