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

[Ahmed Khanzada]

My wife and I are currently trying, so I hope to be a busy parent soon too!

What you have mentioned is a big problem with contributing to anything
GNU. It's hard for people that are familiar with the frictionless
approach of GitHub pull requests to adapt to the decentralized mailing
list approach of contributing code to GNU, myself included. The Emacs
mailing list is having a big convo about this right now.

The debate comes down to: the people contributing the most code already
have a very familiar workflow that they have automated (all probably within
Emacs). Why should they change their contribution model for those who
don't contribute much currently, and may never do so? (Not implying this
is you! Just recounting the debate).

But you're not asking that; you just want to lower the cognitive overhead.

The suggestion of SourceHut made by someone else might be a good one, I
know that they are trying to create a web based portal to the mailing
list workflow.

Another idea I've been playing with in my own personal time is to setup
a distribution of GNU in a Docker container. It will come with all the
tools necessary to hack on GNU and interact with the mailing list:

- Built on Guix
- Tricked out Emacs with Gnus client
- All relevant GNU git repos ready to compile and hack on
- Notmuch tagging, OfflineIMAP syncing
- Optionally signs you up for relevant mailing lists
- Comes with whatever Emacs Lisp / Guile automation the big contributors
  use to automate their workflows (does anyone want to share?)

I can't do much about the brutal learning curve of Emacs, Guix, and GNU,
but I certainly can just package it so it's all ready to go with fancy
scripts for the most common workflows.