Hello,

I wanted to add to this thread my 2 cents. As a person who has recently
(last months) made the first attempts at contributing.

To me, registrations and reliance on JS had always been an obstacle to
using web-based forges. This is one of the reasons I haven't been
contributing to existing projects in the past.

With Guix this issue is gone but there's also another thing that
incentivized me — that, since joining the Guix mailing lists, I am
seeing activity all the time, right at my fingertips (because I have my
email client opened most of the time).

So far I have sent patches 4 times. Once it was a simple update that got
accepted quickly, once I was addressing a problem that turned out to be
better solvable another way and 2 submissions are still waiting for
someone to review them.

Although I had to learn to use `git format-patch` and related tools, I
don't consider it a problem. Actually, I wanted to learn email-based
workflow anyway because it seems to be a more KISS way of software
development.

The amount of new stuff to learn can, however, be a bit overwhelming. I
did learn to use git to send emails but haven't yet started using any of
the templating packages for Emacs that were recommended in Guix
documentation. It would be just too much to process at once.

Do I think Guix has a problem with cognitive overhead? Not at all.
Rather, it seems to be addressing the problems really well.
1. It makes it easy to hack on itself without the need to clone the
   repo first. That's what helped me get familiar with it before I
   could even try to contribute anything.
2. It, by default, updates to the most up-to-date version.
3. It has some detailed documentation.
4. It eases the setting up of one's development environment.

I fact, I suspect the email-based workflow might be automatically
filtering out some bad submissions that would have been made otherwise.
The geeky nature of the project does put it in a kind of a niche where
only geeks dwell. But this is somewhat benefitial because geeks are
those who can build it.

Lastly, sorry if something I wrote is a duplicate of other's opinions —
the thread got soooo long it'd be hard to read through 100% of it

Best,
Wojtek

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On Tue, 05 Sep 2023 22:43:04 +0200 Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler@gmail.com> wrote:

> Am Dienstag, dem 05.09.2023 um 19:40 +0100 schrieb (:
> > Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler@gmail.com> writes:  
> > > Uhm, we have snippets?  
> > 
> > Well, those are exclusive to Emacs :)  And without regard to /that/
> > issue, I do think that there's a problem if the commit format is so
> > complex that it's not trivial for anyone new to the project to write
> > them out manually.  
> By definition, no amount of typing is non-trivial, safe for the empty
> amount, which good luck trying to commit your changes by pure mouse
> movements, I guess?
> 
> Now, if you excuse my French, I think the problem isn't really as much
> that people struggle to type out the perfect ChangeLog on the first
> try, which also makes it odd to request a linter.  Bear in mind that
> committers will sign off anything that appears convincing enough, even
> if there are smaller mistakes in the message.  Trust me, I've been
> there and seen that; and also done it myself.
> 
> Instead, we have seen in this thread appeals to age, appeals to
> perceived lack of personal benefit, and now appeals to typing effort,
> none of which really make that great of an argument against the
> ChangeLog style, especially when they come in combination with a
> refusal to make use of already provided tools.  I think we're starting
> to see the moving of the goal post as the actual game here. 
> 
> Maybe it's time to take a step back and instead of asking “How can we
> decrease the cognitive overhead for contributors?”, we should perhaps
> ask “For which contributors do we want to/can we decrease the cognitive
> overhead?”  We have drifted much from the original post that discussed
> moms with full-time jobs, who struggle to do “difficult” tasks
> (simplified wording; may change the meaning of the OP a little).  Now,
> I personally struggle to see how your personal preference for
> communication media, commit message style, and other things that were
> discussed in any of the preceding threads actually correlate with being
> a parent.  However, I do know that with its 150 million users, most
> people of the world don't have a Github account.  Being one of the 4
> billion email users out there is a comparably low barrier of entry
> imho.  So, whose cognitive overhead do you want to reduce (besides the
> obvious "my own", which everyone always tries)?
>