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

[Imran Iqbal <imran@imraniqbal.org>]

On Mon, Aug 28, 2023 at 01:42:15PM +0200, Giovanni Biscuolo wrote:
> Hi,
>
> interesting thread: thank you very much to all for the comments and
> tips!

Seconded, this has been a great thread to read through.

> For email based patch workflow one and two things are indispensable: a
> mailbox and a MUA capable of piping a message to a command (git am);
> this is the one and only obstacle for contrubutors who are accustomed to
> less than functional MUAs.

I think this is the biggest hurdle. A lot of folks are using gmail and
its web based UI and it is just plain awful. I have made the switch to
using neomutt (and isync + notmuch + mstmp) and it has made emails a joy
to use and work with.

> On the "cognitive overhead" for users like me who are able to (very)
> seldom send some patch to projects, I find it much more straightforward
> to just send a "git format-patch" generated file via email than to open
> a web browser, log-in (or worst: register), fork... naah!

This also has the nice side effect of not having to worry about if you
should force push or not to maintain a clean commits the web ui, and in
general I find the email flow to promote better commit hygiene.

> On the general topic of "email vs. web (fork and PR) patch management" I
> found this articles useful and interesting:

One thing I would to this is Linus's rant on the github style workflow,
as seen in a hard to follow list style UI:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17