Re: Guix Survey (follow up on "How can we decrease the cognitive overhead for contributors?")

[Tao Hansen <worldofgeese@riseup.net>]

Hello, I hope it's ok I'm replying to this email as a follow-up to
decreasing the cognitive overhead for new users. I'm also brand new to
the Guix community and ecosystem. I wanted to share a perspective from a
user on a Lemmy instance who wrote why the Guix ecosystem was not
friendly enough to meet them where they were, a person in their early
twenties. I'd like to suggest approach their criticism with compassion
and open-mindedness.

@velox_vulnus writes at https://lemmy.ml/comment/4625080

> I don’t like the vibe of ageism against young people that is
> associated with GNU. What is also frustrating is their reluctance to
> improve their infrastructure.

> This reason is kind of terrible, I admit, but they could choose to
> move over to Matrix over IRC, but they choose to be willingly open to
> spam over having a proper, documented chat channel. I am also
> reluctant to use my personal mail, for the mailing list. Matrix gives
> me that anonymity, without also having to geopardize on participation.
> NixOS is on Matrix, and that’s why I like it. I know Matrix isn’t
> perfect, but it the better choice between any other messenger.

This user could use an email address dedicated to Guix discussion but
really I can only agree that sticking to IRC, which requires a lot of
effort to keep a history log and more effort to host a bouncer makes
contributing to synchronous discussions difficult. I, myself, am only
active on the community-run Matrix server and another, less free,
channel because the overhead is just too high. 

> They could choose to remove non-Libre JS from GitLab, Sourcehut or
> Gitea, or at least come with a new source hosting platform, but they
> choose not to. 

I also have a hard time with the insistence on the "Old Ways" as somehow
more pure, more legitimate than the new. There's some sense of the
expression, "You kids get off my lawn!" And the decentralized nature of
sending Git patches by email, which I still have not ventured to try,
makes it hard to *discover* Guix development in a single place. A user
needs to go to any one of the mailing lists, pull the Git repo or browse
Savannah or the issue frontend for bugs and new features they might be
interested in, and generally have an idea of what they want to be
looking for to find it. Discovery by serendipity is missing.

When using the mailing list, even figuring out how to reply to the right
thread here in Gnus is trying and I'm not even sure if I've done it
right: people change the subject line, threads grow so large they become
unmanageable; I had to make sure I CC'd the whole list instead of just
reply to this mail's author. I still haven't figured out how to stick
guix-devel in my Gnus home screen: my starting view is always empty
and I have to remember the shortcut to get to the gigantic overview of
every Gmane list (this isn't a cry for help).

There's more to their post: I encourage folks to check it out.

We have the FOSS technology to tackle a lot of these critiques and bring
in a whole new wave of contributors. We have fully open Git forges and
modern messaging protocols to make a brand new developer-friendly Guix a
reality.