Re: contributing to Emacs

[Konstantin Kharlamov]

On Tue, 2023-06-20 at 14:14 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Konstantin Kharlamov <hi-angel@yandex.ru>
> > Cc: arne_bab@web.de, ams@gnu.org, luangruo@yahoo.com, philipk@posteo.net, 
> >         emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:29:10 +0300
> > 
> > > Practical suggestions for changes that would make it easier are
> > > welcome, but they must not make the lives of the current developers
> > > significantly harder.
> > 
> > For starters I would be happy if at least the section about submitting
> > patches
> > was reformatted into two sections. My last email explaining that no
> > information
> > will be lost in such reformat¹ was unanswered, so I don't know what is the
> > current state of this discussion.
> > 
> > 1: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2023-06/msg00506.html
> 
> I already said I didn't think this was a good idea, and explained why
> I thought so.

You said you afraid some information will be lost. I explained that it won't.
You didn't provide any counter-arguments, so I kind of hoped it is clear at this
point that it will only bring benefit. If you are referring to something I
didn't answer, please point that out, because to my knowledge I replied to
everything.

> In any case, that section hardly has any bearing on the main issue at
> hand: how to make it easier for people to contribute.  I explained
> that as well.

That is because the large issue consists of many small ones! The only single
"big move" that is theoretically possible is just move Emacs to a Gitlab
instance, which will remove necessity to care of any docs because finding a
developer who doesn't know how git-forges work is unlikely. But I *do not*
suggest doing that because I know many long-timers would not want that. So
instead I am trying to bite at different pieces that could be improved without
affecting existing workflow. This docs discussion is just one small piece.

> I'd appreciate if this seasonal "what's wrong with Emacs
> contributions" discussion would either switch to discussing some
> innovative and useful ideas for how to make it easier for
> contributors, or just died if there are no such ideas yet.
> Reiterating the same claims and the same arguments doesn't sound like
> a good use of our time and bandwidth.

To my knowledge, I didn't "reiterate same claims", but was answering your
reasoning about not wanting to change the docs, and your reasoning didn't seem
to have been recursive so far. And it is pointless to suggest new ideas if we
didn't even finish discussing old ones.