Re: A "cosmetic changes" commit that removes security fixes

[Andreas Enge]

Hello Léo,

Am Mon, Apr 26, 2021 at 09:31:18PM +0200 schrieb Léo Le Bouter:
> also consider other things like how people feel when they
> contribute to GNU Guix, do they feel discouraged or rewarded by their
> contributions

indeed that is an important aspect.

> I find that it can be tiring and very discouraging to
> respond back and forth to many many review comments, and at some point,
> even if things have some rough edges, I tend to prefer rewarding a
> contributor for their work than insist the commit history should be
> perfect or something. I also stopped upholding myself to high rigorous
> standards at all times, also because I think it is not good for my
> mental health.

I agree that it can be a bit tiring, but at the same time, I think that
the high quality of Guix is a very important feature, that sets it apart
from some other distros. It is definitely one of the reasons I am using
it and have been contributing to it. And it has been one of the defining
features of Guix from the start that we try to avoid rough edges as much
as possible. Like building texlive from source instead of wrapping Debian
binaries, to give just one example. Or striving for bootstrappability,
which can be seen as removing rough edges at the expense of extraordinary
efforts.

Luckily, I do not think that enjoying contributing and keeping high quality
standards are in contradiction.

> I tend to move the responsability of rigorous testing
> into tools, I think putting testing/checking into tools is at the same
> time good for mental health and inclusive because it means also
> everyone can check their own changes and correct errors.

Tooling can definitely be helpful with this. We have "guix lint", and if
you have ideas for improved tools, these would be very welcome.

Andreas