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

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Fannys <email@fannys.me> writes:

>> But again, even if this is a great option for you, it might be a really bad
>> option for some other people. Everybody does not have the time to spend
>> learning emacs, or other specific tool. It's ok if the workflow suggests that
>> but it's not great if we have no other alternative.
>>
>> It's not accessible and imposes a barrier in some people.
>
> Yeah agreed. And we should be consious of that.
> Ironically by mandating Emacs and Email we force people to use specific
> tools while at the same time even though the same people will complain(!) 
> against vendor lock-in
> like github.

We don’t *mandate* the use of Emacs.  It’s just a common recommendation
because it works so well with text and is trivially extensible, so it’s
a common target for helper tools.  Surely we also wouldn’t call a
recommendation to use a shell script “vendor lock-in” just because it
needs Bash.

Emacs works well with text, and text is all that’s needed in a
patch-based workflow, which is in fact vendor agnostic.

Of course this doesn’t mean that it is as accessible as we’d want.

-- 
Ricardo