From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.io!.POSTED.blaine.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Konstantin Kharlamov Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: contributing to Emacs Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2023 22:39:42 +0300 Message-ID: <8423a35750d8d8e0437c7708f6b4d0bbdfdb7fe0.camel@yandex.ru> References: <83v8fnslfz.fsf@gnu.org> <87v8fnh1h2.fsf@web.de> <83mt0zs9rc.fsf@gnu.org> <0a968a4e1b267c0f15dd237e6ea12a709fc06d5e.camel@yandex.ru> <838rcisj7o.fsf@gnu.org> <6537fa5fa5c1fe8437ed99ee0988e35895f5a54b.camel@yandex.ru> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Injection-Info: ciao.gmane.io; posting-host="blaine.gmane.org:116.202.254.214"; logging-data="30557"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@ciao.gmane.io" User-Agent: Evolution 3.48.2 Cc: eliz@gnu.org, arne_bab@web.de, luangruo@yahoo.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org To: "Alfred M. 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List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane-mx.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane-mx.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.io gmane.emacs.devel:306886 Archived-At: On Sat, 2023-06-17 at 14:36 -0400, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote: > =C2=A0=C2=A0 (I changed the email title as I feel this is kind of offtopi= c regarding > Android) > > My "qualifications" are also off-topic for emacs-devel, it is you who > needs to answer what "notoriously hard" means.=C2=A0 Clearly, people do n= ot > find it as hard as you claim to. Okay, well. You see, in 90% of open source projects contributions work like= this: you create a branch, you add commits, you `git push` =E2=80=94 and then if your= changes weren't registered yet for review, you'll get a link in your terminal to immediatel= y send them for review. Otherwise you don't do anything at all, it is already= in review, and simple push makes it available to maintainers to see. A few projects have special requirements, like "have a Signed-off-by" line.= In such case in a few minutes you'll get an email saying your commits didn't pass C= I, so you look at it, you fix it. Such simplicity makes contribution a complete no-brainer. I can't count how= many times I was stumbling upon something easily fixable in a project I don't ev= en use, (in such cases it's mostly docs improvements) and in five minutes I had cha= nges applied and sent for review. This "90%" you can count as the chance that if a new developer comes, they = would expect it to be that simple. Which isn't the case for Emacs. If contributin= g to most open sources projects only requires finding out their upstream URL, in Emac= s case you also need to go read HUGE "Sending patches" section. And then if that's not= enough, from what I've seen maintainers also expect you to have read CONTRIBUTE sec= tion, which is absolutely large, much bigger than "Sending patches". (to be fair,= if you are a new contributor, you won't know it exists because "Sending patches" h= as no mention of it). This alone may eliminate a number of contributors who has no experience wit= h contributing via mailing lists (I think a lot of devs has no such experienc= e, because offhand the only widely popular projects that still use MLs are the kernel,= glibc, gcc and Emacs), and who wouldn't like to have to spend too much time figuri= ng it out. But some devs know how contributing via ML works. They will probably send t= heir patchset to bug-gnu-emacs, and=E2=80=A6 they will find out that debbugs for= some reason created a dozen bugreports for each individual patch =F0=9F=98=84 Amazing. But let's set aside the "newness" problem, let's imagine a developer who al= ready has experience, know all these problems and obstacles. Like me. Even in this ca= se contributing is inconvenient, because you can't "just push new revision" an= d be done, you need to also send it to some URL. And then some maintainers have differ= ing requirements: typically in ML-managed project you just do `git send-email`,= but I've also been asked once by someone to attach patches instead, which makes situ= ation even more complicated. You see: these are complete no-brainer in 90% of projects= . But every time I contribute here I have to think about such stuff which is comp= letely irrelevant to the changes being sent. And how do you even get a link where to send new patch revision? I have two= dozens email notifications coming to my email everyday. So I will have to search t= hrough all that stuff. And then, debbugs has no syntax highlight whatsoever and does not show the = latest patch revision. So studying the patch quickly in the interface is inconveni= ent at best, you'd rather open it locally in Emacs (if you have the patch locally)= . How do maintainers review code being sent I don't even know. I am a co-main= tainer of `color-identifiers-mode`, and we have set up CI and tests, so I immediately= know a contribution at least passes tests. But in absence of CI I guess you have t= o manually check that the patch someone sent at least compiles=E2=80=A6? So, yes, contributing to Emacs is hard.