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

[<phil@beadling.co.uk>]

>I really like Guix, I like what it promises, I love the community around
it, and that's what keeps me here. But it's a >deeply frustrating experience
to try to contribute to. I've been a contributor in various forms to a great
many free >and open source software projects over the years, and Guix is
easily one of the worst in that regard.

This aligns with somewhat with my (limited) experience.  I'm a massive fan
of Guix, but I did find the process a bit opaque; even after seeking
clarification from the mailists, and some of my patches eventually fell
through the cracks, or in other cases, someone would kindly submit on my
behalf.  That's really nice of them to do, but it's obviously not the way
things should work.

I've contributed to other Guix channels (some run by people closely
affiliated with Guix proper) and other open source projects and found the
overhead is usually no more than few minutes to read/follow to the how-to
guide.  I don't have a favourite forge nor a specific process I want to
promote - but it should be easy and require little effort to understand and
setup.  Really the typical use-case should be close to push-button - with
the focus being on reviewing the contribution rather than the mechanics of
how this is done.

I (and other colleagues) have a bunch of core enhancements, and quite a few
packages sat in my (now previous) company's Guix channel that would be great
to get into Guix proper (if the wider community deem them appropriate/useful
of course!), but the overhead means we kept avoiding getting this done and
the company runs off a lagged fork of Guix they manually update and rebase
themselves, rather than pushing their work upstream into Guix.

I 100% accept failing to get patches into Guix proper is also lethargy on my
behalf, and perhaps I'm guilty of carping rather than proactively helping,
but in choosing what to contribute to, and when spare-time is sadly limited,
the amount of overhead and chasing required both become inevitable
considerations on where to focus time.