Re: How can we decrease the cognitive overhead for contributors?

[paul <goodoldpaul@autistici.org>]

Hello Ricardo,

On 9/3/23 09:36, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> Mumi commit bda10fa1b37fed8ea313ea8ad49fa6146e65b4c0 changed the AND to
> the Xapian default of OR.  Here’s the rationale from the commit message:
>
>      xapian: Do not override the default OR implicit query operator.
>
>      An implicit AND operator is overly restrictive. It was only necessary
>      because prefixes that should have been indexed as boolean prefixes
>      were not.
>
> Xapian *does* rank search results by score.  It also supports fuzzy
> search.  But let me move a little so I won’t stand in the way of a good
> rant.

I don't think this is a productive attitude, especially from someone 
well known in the community for their historical high quality commitment 
to the Guix project. It's already quite difficult to sustain a 
discussion with what appears to be most of the Guix Project committers 
as less experienced members of the community.

No one's point here is to denigrate work that has been done in the past 
and that enabled us to have this discussion today in the first place.

The point of this discussion is fundamentally a healthy future for the 
Guix Project committers collective imho. If the flow of new contributors 
stops we are doomed, no one can be expected of bearing the 
responsibility having commit access is, for their whole life imho.

We need a healthy "succession" story.

>
>> As I see it, this is an issue of developer resources.  Mumi and Debbugs
>> have no chance of catching up to any alterntive that already has a
>> sustainable financial model and professional developers working on it.
>>
>> Why are we trying to compete with Sourcehut?  What's the end goal?
> I can’t make myself even clearer about this, but I’ll repeat myself
> again: we are not.

We are not and yet one of the most (maybe the second maybe the first) 
successful proposal to address Katherine's points is to rewrite 
everything™. In this sense I believe Csepp's objection is quite clear:

Do we have the resources to maintain a CI suite (Guix Build 
Coordinator), a QA suite (Guix Data Service), a Debbugs frontend (Mumi) 
and a to-be-defined new patch tracking system? What's the story for when 
the current committers will have too much life to do to keep having the 
current commitment level?

What's the story for having a healthy turnover of Guix highest 
responsibilities?
> Please go ahead and package the rest of Sourcehut, so we can host it and
> finally forget about Mumi and Debbugs.

Again, this is not a competition between Sourcehut and Mumi. This is a 
discussion between adults that care very much about the same 
philosophical and political points about technological control and autonomy.

giacomo