Re: contributing to Emacs

[David Masterson]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Konstantin Kharlamov <hi-angel@yandex.ru>
>> 
>> On Sun, 2023-06-18 at 22:11 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> > > From: "Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <arne_bab@web.de>
>> > > 
>> > > > > In the discussion it became clear (at least to me) that the way to
>> > > > > contribute is not the main complication, but the discoverability of 
>> > > > > that
>> > > > > way and that the way seems hard when you see more than a sheet of 
>> > > > > paper
>> > > > > in print as instructions.
>> > > > 
>> > > > You are inventing a problem where there is none.
>> > > 
>> > > You said that the w32 port didn’t get many additional devs. I’m trying
>> > > to find reasons — and on the website I see obvious reasons that keep
>> > > people from contributing. And the more I look into it, the more I see
>> > > how broken the new-dev-wants-to-contribute usecase of the website is.
>> > 
>> > I understand and appreciate what you are trying to do, but those
>> > aren't the reasons for lack of active contributors to Emacs.
>> 
>> I think it cumulative of many factors, and fixing every small factor that 
>> comes
>> into play increases probability of getting a new contributor.
>
> The suggested measures will not fix any such factors.

Would you say that Emacs still has development practices from the
80s/90s that, given the chance and newer toolsets, you could see being
done differently and better?

It's okay to say that what Emacs has now is working well for the current
developers, but is difficult for on-boarding new developers that want to
start out simple before graduating into Emacs internals.

-- 
David Masterson