Re: Gitlab Migration

[Tim Cross]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>
> IOW, the most important reason for this move is to be more welcoming
> to casual contributors, not to make the job much easier for the
> maintainers.

I agree. Also worth noting that making it too easy to contribute is not
necessarily a positive. I have worked on and helped maintain projects
where the bar for contributing was too low and you ended up with far too
many low quality or completely misguided patches and contributions.

As an example, a recent new release in one project has resulted in a
number of patches that are completely unnecessary because the
functionality they fix/add was either already available or due to local
configuration problems. While this likely indicates a need for better
documentation, part of the issue is due to it being just too easy to
generate a PR, which is often fired off and then forgotten by the OP - a
sort of 'log and flog' mentality that results in lots more
contributions, but a much higher noise ratio which consumes valuable
maintainer time sorting and analysing.

The right level of resistance to contributing can be a positive provided
that level is set appropriately. Many of the discussions I've read about
barriers to contributing to Emacs seem to be centred around
discoverability rather than honours process. Perhaps addressing that
aspect would be worthwhile rather than trying to re-engineer a whole new
framework?