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

[Katherine Cox-Buday]

On 8/23/23 12:03 PM, Andreas Enge wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Am Wed, Aug 23, 2023 at 10:27:31AM -0700 schrieb Felix Lechner via Development 
> of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution.:
> > >       I can't ever seem to get the GNU style commit messages correct.
> > Neither can I. The style apparently helps with automated maintenance
> > of the changelog, but I do not understand why a changelog is useful
> > for a rolling release model.
>
> personally, I find them super helpful to grep through commit messages
> to find changes, like when a file was touched for the last time (now
> I think that git wizards will have a better solution; but you get the
> idea). Or when a package was added. Or updated to a specific version.

I have no love for Git's CLI (that's one of the reasons the email-based 
workflow grates on me; I use magit for everything), but I found it 
interesting that here you present a valid argument against having to 
learn Git in one way, and elsewhere people are making arguments for 
learning the git send-email command. I draw no conclusions from that, 
but it caught my eye!

FWIW, the git command you could use is:

git log --grep=foo -- the/file/path.scm

> > * Contributing to Guix is not for you
> > * It's OK to make lots of mistakes
>
> Definitely "no" to the first one, and "yes" to the second one!
> I think that even when one only contributes from time to time, but
> regularly, habits will form and mistakes disappear.

I've been contributing to Guix since 2018. I've definitely learned a lot 
about Guix idiosyncrasies, but until I wrote my script, I'd forget to do 
something every time I submitted a patch.

--
Katherine