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

[Csepp]

wolf <wolf@wolfsden.cz> writes:

> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
> 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.
>> 

The FOSS purism is a bigger deciding factor for sure.  Maybe I'm
conflating things and they said they didn't want to bother
*contributing* to Guix, but I think they also stopped being Guix users.