Re: contributing to Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Konstantin Kharlamov <hi-angel@yandex.ru>
> Cc: arne_bab@web.de, ams@gnu.org, luangruo@yahoo.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2023 13:13:23 +0300
> 
> 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.

Like I said: we prefer a single patch for each changeset.  The
problems presented by patch series are one reason.  And yet, we will
never reject a patch series, even though it makes the process
inconvenient and confusing.

I don't see what else do we need to argued about here.