Re: Contributing?

[Yoni Rabkin]

Erica <e.a.gebhart@gmail.com> writes:

> I am very frustrated trying to find any sort of community and gnu.org
> projects seem like the most difficult to contact and even harder to
> contribute to.

I'm unsure of how to help here. I think that GNU is such a loose
collection of disparate individuals that it may be hard to make such
generalization. It also depends on what you are looking for in a
community; different people come with very different expectations.

> I have attempted to subscribe to this list a couple of times.  So far
> no response.

Would you like me to manually subscribe your email address?

> This is the first response to me in any case.

You got another response on the mailing list today:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emms-help/2023-11/msg00004.html

> So it's really not clear to me what sort of activity is here. I could
> see some activity in git but that doesn't mean there is an active
> community.

Perhaps you can explain what you mean by "community" in this regard. The
community activity of a software project is primarily coding. Do you
mean something else?

> I have a bunch of fixes that I have done in the last couple of
> weeks. My use case requires album artist to work, among other
> things. I've got it all working and now I'm hunting down other
> problems. Playlist format loss, and Other things.  I have a to-do
> list.
>
> So the process is that to contribute, I email patches to this email
> address?  Emms-help@gnu.org? Then I hope you like them?

As stated on the site (https://www.gnu.org/software/emms/), you should
send patches, and direct discussion, to the mailing list.

Developers who become consistently active eventually get invited to have
direct git access to the Savannah repo, so that they don't need to
bother with the intermediary step of sending patches to the mailing list
(but others prefer it that way.)

Emms is a GNU project. Therefore, if we end up wanting to include a
non-trivial amount of your code, we'll ask for a copyright assignment
for that code (this is a straightforward, one-time process):
https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2022/fall/copyright-assignment-with-the-fsf

I hope that's of help.

> Le mar. 7 nov. 2023, 08:24, Yoni Rabkin <yoni@rabkins.net> a écrit :
>
>> Erica <e.a.gebhart@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> > I'm starting to think there is no one here and development is mostly or
>> > completely dead.
>>
>> If you look at the git repo, you'll find development work going back
>> many years:
>> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/elpa.git/?h=externals/emms
>>
>> According to one independent source (we have no contact with MELPA),
>> Emms is in the 90th percentile of downloads: https://melpa.org/#/emms
>>
>> Similarly, you'll find communication every month on the mailing list
>> with bug reports, patches and discussion:
>> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emms-help/
>>
>> Therefore Calling Emms "mostly or completely dead" is at the very least
>> objectively wrong. But more importantly, is potentially hurtful to the
>> efforts of your fellow free software hackers. Please don't do that.
>>
>> People here on the mailing list are volunteering their time to hack on a
>> project they like; exactly like you.
>>
>> Code contributions are always welcome. I would recommend finding and
>> focusing on a particular issue you'd like to tackle. Either discuss it
>> first on the mailing list, or simply hack on it and send in
>> patches. We'll proceed from there.
>>
>> --
>>    "Cut your own wood and it will warm you twice"
>>

-- 
   "Cut your own wood and it will warm you twice"