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

["Kjartan Óli Águstsson" <kjartanoli@outlook.com>]

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Tao Hansen <worldofgeese@riseup.net> writes:

> 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.

As a person in my early twenties, who has contributed a few (small)
patches to Guix and Emacs, I want to offer another datapoint/perspective
on this issue.

> @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.

I'll be honest, I don't understand this point.  I've never felt any vibe
of ageism from any interaction with the GNU project.  Is this just about
using mailing lists instead of some forge and other similar complaints
of 'outdated' systems/processes?

>> What is also frustrating is their reluctance to improve their
>> infrastructure.

Purely personal anecdote here, but I've never seen a reluctance to
improve infrastructure.  I've seen a reluctance to make changes which
could negatively affect existing workflows, but I wouldn't characterise
that as refusal to improve.

>> 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!"

Having made contributions to projects using both methods.  I massively
prefer the mailing list + patch workflow of GNU to GitHub's Pull Request
model.

> 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.

Where does 'Discovery by serendipity occur on GitHub or the other
forges?  Personally I've never experienced more such discoveries than by
reading threads on the development mailing list of a project.

> 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.

How friendly are these Git forges and messaging protocols to the
continued use of existing email based workflows?

-- 
Kjartan Oli Agustsson
GPG Key fingerprint: 4801 0D71 49C0 1DD6 E5FD  6AC9 D757 2FE3 605E E6B0

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