Re: contributing to Emacs

[Konstantin Kharlamov]

On Sun, 2023-06-18 at 13:02 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Konstantin Kharlamov <hi-angel@yandex.ru>
> > Cc: "Alfred M. Szmidt" <ams@gnu.org>, eliz@gnu.org, luangruo@yahoo.com, 
> >         emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2023 12:56:33 +0300
> > 
> > Okay, so, here's an obvious one: a patch series sent to
> > bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> > should not create separate bugreports for every patch.
> > 
> > In ML-managed projects it is typical to send patches as a series, and when
> > you
> > doing that results in such surprising behaviour, it creates an additional
> > emotional and mental load both for you and for maintainers who would need to
> > do
> > something with these separate reports.
> 
> Our preference is to send patches as a single patch, not as patch
> series.
> 
> That said, people are sometimes sending series, and we don't ask them
> to resend, we process those series anyway.
> 
> As for separate bug reports, this is easily fixed by merging them.

Unfortunately merging bugreports does not fix that. The last patch I had to
Emacs was sent with a cover letter and resulted in two reports: one for the
cover letter and another for the patch itself. You may remember that it resulted
in a confusion, because α) discussions happened on both threads, but then a new
patch version was only sent to one of them, so there other thread wasn't
notified that comments were addressed, and β) you may remember 3 months after
the patch got accepted someone was asking the status. Which is because one of
the threads was closed saying that the patch is applied, but then the other
thread into which a person was looking has no such comment.

> So I see no problem here.

This is psychology. Having a report per patch may not be a problem for you, but
when a contributor sends patches and gets into such situation, they do not know
it is okay. They will be frightened and frustrated, because it looks like
something just went wrong. Such situation being okay needs at least be mentioned
in "sending patches" section, and at best it should just work.