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

[Ricardo Wurmus]

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.)

“too hard” sounds (perhaps unintentionally) derisive.  It’s a real issue
for the projects when very capable contributors like Katherine encounter
numerous little obstacles that in aggregate lead to a very rational
decision to be selective about what contribution to send off on this
unnecessarily long journey.

It’s not that writing commit messages is hard.  It’s one of many
obstacles, and the lack of clear objective guidelines (fun fact: we
aren’t actually following the Changelog rules) that means that even
something as trivial (compared to the rest of the work) as the commit
message must be placed on the pile of chores.  Add on top of that that
there’s a low probability of gratification, because committers like
myself are getting burned out and so patches simply go unacknowledged or
only ever see a first cursory review.

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.

Katherine, I’m very happy you brought this up and continue to respond in
this thread to clarify and steer the discussion into a fruitful
direction.  I know I couldn’t do it.  I thank you for this work, and I
hope that the project can come up with ways to lower the barriers to
entry.

-- 
Ricardo


PS: It’s probably no exaggeration to say that I’m only still
contributing to Guix because I already *have* commit access and I’m
committed to ensuring that support for R and science packages doesn’t
degrade.  That alone keeps me busy.  While commit messages aren’t really
an obstacle for me personally (probably because nobody judges my
messages), I probably wouldn’t be able to justify spending my now very
limited free time to contributing to Guix now that the reward/effort
scale is so unbalanced.