Re: proposal: guix-mentors@gnu.org list/alias

[zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Fri, 03 Jun 2022 at 13:48, Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler@ist.tugraz.at> wrote:

> 1. When a new contributor sends a mail to guix-patches, the mail gets
> added to a manual approval queue. (This currently happens)
> 2. A human operator manually approves of the patch as in flags it as
> "Not spam" (This currently happens)
> 3. A new issue number is claimed in debbugs, yadda yadda.
> 4. Since we know (from 1+2), that this is a new contributor, a separate
> message is sent to guix-mentors (from debbugs or what have you)
> informing mentors about this contribution.

IIUC, “new contributors” mean «first time to guix-patches»; when I could
send a (simple) R package and asking some mentoring and then send
another (more complex) package and also asking some mentoring.

Such approach is indeed a good way for catching first time contributor –
and it appears a good thing to catch. :-)


> Alternatively to the above, which would (in theory) forward the patches
> as soon as improved, we could implement this with a separate backend
> such as mumi, which would basically check for new patches, check
> whether any of those patches come from hitherto unknown sources, and if
> so send a mail towards guix-mentors.

Since it is #3, #1 and #2, indeed this step #4 would be a forward.
Well, I do not know how automatic it could be and how extra much work it
puts on the shoulder of the human operator (1+2) – already busy enough. :-)


> As for guix-mentors vs. other mailing lists, refer to Ricardo's initial
> proposal.  Interestingly, zimoun had a similar idea, but phrased it
> less wordy.

My proposal is that the contributor wanting a mentor uses a specific
tools for sending to guix-patches; tool which uses internal of Debbugs
(X-Debbugs-CC) triggering the CC at step #3.


Cheers,
simon