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


From: Katherine Cox-Buday
Subject: Re: How can we decrease the cognitive overhead for contributors?
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2023 10:05:52 -0600
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.15.0

On 9/8/23 6:40 AM, Giovanni Biscuolo wrote:
Ricardo,

Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

Giovanni,

You are obviously free not to contribute your patches upstream but the
fact that you decided not to because it's "too hard" (my executive
summary about your complaints about Change Log content rules) to write
commit messages suitable for contribution it _not_ a Guix maintainers
fault, not at all.

As a former Guix co-maintainer I disagree with this take.  (Nobody even
brought up the word “fault”, which is a particularly unhelpful lens for
understanding social issues, in my opinion.)

sorry for using "fault", I can't find a better term

“too hard” sounds (perhaps unintentionally) derisive.

the complete sentence is: «"too hard" (my executive summary about your
complaints about Change Log content rules)»

what can I add about my intentions?

[...]

It’s not that writing commit messages is hard.  It’s one of many
obstacles,

IMO one of the very little ones

Taking a single step is trivial. Walking a thousand miles is difficult. The aggregate is the thing that matters most!

And these are subjective statements, which are bad to rest decisions on. I have the opinion that this style of commit message is difficult and doesn't have a lot of value; others think it's easy and find a lot of value in it.

I don't place much emphasis on my opinion or others' on this, but I place an enormous emphasis on the existence of the two groups. We should be curious why the two groups hold their opinions, and curious about a mutual path forward.

Instead of setting up camp and throwing rocks, let's share a meal and create a better way for everyone.

We can’t blame anyone for seeing these two piles and come to the
conclusion that it’s not worth the hassle — especially when operating
your own channel is so easy in comparison.

I'm not blaming Katherine, I respect her decision; I just wanted to say:
please don't blame the guidelines about ChangeLog for the two (or more)
piles.

No hard feeling, Gio. I want to echo what Ricardo is saying: viewing these conversations through the lens of blame and fault is not the intent, and is not helpful. In my original message I intentionally said that this was not a list of grievances, but an attempt to describe the "shape" of the problem.

While I do search for root-causes to issues, it's not done with the intent to cast blame on something. It's done with curiosity, and the desire to make the situation better for everyone.



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