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

[wolf]

On 2023-09-02 21:08:12 +0200, Csepp wrote:
> 
> paul <goodoldpaul@autistici.org> writes:
> 
> > Hello Giovanni,
> >
> > I get that you really don't find the web based workflow to bring enough 
> > advantages to justify the migration, but first please consider the picture 
> > that
> > Katherine sent and that we are evaluating the adequateness of the email 
> > medium as a FOSS contribution management tool over email. 
> >
> > If we lower the bar for contributions more people are gonna be invested in 
> > Guix and will have interest in becoming committer and reviewer. My
> > impression today is not that there aren't enough resources to cover 
> > reviews, the bottleneck is the total time that committers are able to 
> > dedicate to
> > reviewing (potentially re-reviewing if some other non-committer contributor 
> > has already done a first review) and actually commiting changes.
> >
> > I have many contributions opened more than a year ago where (sometimes also 
> > because of me obviously, we're all working after work here) the
> > interactions on the issue are separated by many weeks, sometimes even 
> > months.
> >
> > To ease that bottleneck we just need to give more time to committers or to 
> > increase the number of committers. All the automation and process changes
> > we evaluate should be focused on either one of this two goals. I don't have 
> > evidence that any web forge will help (maybe someone has?), but I wouldn't
> > throw it out of the window just because it does not ease the current review 
> > process.
> >
> > cheers
> >
> > giacomo
> 
> To second this, I'd like to note for the record that on fedi at least
> 1-2 people told me that they chose Nix over Guix because they don't want
> to deal with the email based workflow.  At least one of these people is
> a highly skilled programmer with decades of experience.

Since we are collecting anecdotal data here, I pretty much stopped contributing
to Alpine after they stopped using the mailing list.  The friction (for me)
increased a lot compared to just calling git send-email.

From my circle of acquaintances, all people who picked Nix did it because they
did not like Guix' purism regarding software freedom and wanted something that
"gets the job done".

I am skeptical regarding people picking based on web vs. email flows, there are
more important differences.

> 
> While I mostly argued for Sourcehut, I think the pull-based alternatives
> should also be kept in mind.
> 

-- 
There are only two hard things in Computer Science:
cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.

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