Re: casual contributing with git

[Amin Bandali <bandali@gnu.org>]

Jean-Christophe Helary <brandelune@gmail.com> writes:

> Thank you very much Amin.
>

You’re very welcome, Jean-Christophe.

>

[...]

>
> There is a discovery issue here because when you go to Savannah
> (https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs/) you don't find that kind of
> information and instead find a link to EmacsWiki.
>
> What is the best way to propose changes to the Savannah top page ?
>

I think only the “project admins” can modify the text on a project’s
page on Savannah.  So, I think asking here on emacs-devel would be the
first thing to try.  If you don’t hear from any of the admins listed on
the Emacs project about your question/suggestion here, feel free to try
emailing one of them directly with your suggestion.

>
> Also, the Savannah page links to https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
> which is beautifully designed but has no information about
> "contributing" or "developing" even in "Further information".
>
> What is the best way to propose changes to the gnu/emacs page ?
>

Again, I think the first step would be bringing it up here on this list.
Then, you could have a look Emacs’s web page repository [0] to see if
there’s a person that frequently commits to the web pages repo and takes
care of the project’s site.  Currently, for Emacs that person seems to
be Nicolas Petton.

[0]: http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/emacs/emacs/

If all of these fail, you could write to webmasters@gnu.org and request
changes.  However, this should be an absolute last resort, since package
maintainers in charge of their own projects’ pages, and the webmasters
generally don’t modify project pages directly, unless a maintainer asks
for it or approves the change.

>
>> In short, usually you would develop on a local branch created from
>> latest master.  When you’re done and/or when you’d like to show your
>> work to others and get feedback, you create a patch from your changes,
>> e.g. using git-format-patch, and use your mail client to send it to the
>> correct mailing list for the project.  In the case of Emacs, that would
>> be one of emacs-devel@gnu.org (this list) or bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org,
>> depending on the nature of your patch and e.g. if you’re fixing an
>> existing bug.  I skimmed through the first link in your email, and it
>> does mention format-patch at some point.
>
> That's what I found out eventually. But the EmacsWiki pages don't
> really address people who don't have write access so I was a bit
> confused.
>

Right.  Since it’s a wiki, you could edit the page yourself (by clicking
the “Edit this page” link on the bottom of that page) and try to improve
the instructions and make them clearer :)

[...]

> Thank you.
>
>> Hope this helps.
>
> Very much. Thank you again.
>
> Jean-Christophe Helary

Happy to hear that!

Cheers,
amin