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

[brian]

"(" <paren@disroot.org> writes:

> Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler@gmail.com> writes:
>> Uhm, we have snippets?
>
> Well, those are exclusive to Emacs :)  And without regard to /that/
> issue, I do think that there's a problem if the commit format is so
> complex that it's not trivial for anyone new to the project to write
> them out manually.

Even with the snippets, vc's functionality, and magit, not all cases are
covered. Plus you have ti figure out how to use those tools for this, if
you even know they can do it in the first place. It's a lot.

On top of that, the documentation is lacking. The Guix manual refers you
to the GNU documentation, which doesn't really cover our specific
uses. I, like everyone else from what I can tell, just read existing log
entries to try and figure out what to put in there.

For the record, I don't really object to the header line format[1], it's
the stuff under the commit message proper that gets me. All the

‘* foo/bar.scm new-package (inputs): add input’

stuff. I literally can never remember this format, no matter how many
times I do it. I'm reasonably sure square brackes go in there some
where. It can take me quite a while to put together all that stuff, even
with magit's help.

-bjc

[1] I would like to see the ‘prefix:’ prefixes documented somewhere. If
I'm not messing with packages and can just type ‘gnu:’, I have no idea
what to put in, and often even git logs don't help, so I just wing it.