Re: Guix Days: Patch flow discussion

[Wilko Meyer <w@wmeyer.eu>]

Hi Guix,

Tomas Volf <~@wolfsden.cz> writes:

> Or, to put it in a different way: The problem is not that too few patches get
> merged.  The problem is that too few patches get reviewed.

I'd say that both things stem from the same premise, a disproportion of
available resources to the work that exists. This is not something
specific to Guix as a project, but can be observed in many other
projects as well (I couldn't name one larger free software or open
source project without this issue, but could easily name some where this
applies). The interests of a contributer sending a patch sometimes may
not align with the interests of the project/sometimes may not align with
the interests of commiters and so on. This happens and is a pretty
common reason for contributions being ignored and I see that as somewhat
a default modus operandi in many projects. Especially if available time
is a rather sparse resource.

I'd like to suggest to explicity refer to pragmatic ways forward in
Guixes Contributing manual section that don't rely on the availability
of other peoples (in this case committers/reviewers) time while
empowering contributors to use their changes in a good way if a patch
doesn't make it in/a bug report gets no reaction? Guix offers ways to
use packages outside of Guix proper in a pretty feasible and
maintainable way (manifests, setting up channels), maybe promoting them
as an alternative to having things in guix proper "as soon as possible"
(as that's not the only option to have things in a usable form) would be
beneficial.

-- 
Kind regards,

Wilko Meyer
w@wmeyer.eu