Re: How can we decrease the cognitive overhead for contributors?

[Liliana Marie Prikler]

Hi Simon,

Am Montag, dem 11.09.2023 um 12:36 +0200 schrieb Simon Tournier:
> Today, the review and commit process have many steps, more or less
> simple, not all sure!, well at the end, we have something complex.
> 
> One trivial step is to apply the patch (or series) to your local
> checkout and so many things can lead to some useless frictions.  For
> example, the patch does not apply because the base commit is not
> provided, or because it is badly formatted, or because….  And one
> ends to fix themself, e.g., probably using some manual trick just for
> applying the patch.  No value for the project.
> 
> Yes, QA is currently helping for that specific example about applying
> patches but the solution depends on why the patch does not apply.
As a committer, I've already shared my tool for applying patches from
mumi.  It is currently broken due to yet another bug in mumi that I
can't figure out the cause of, but assuming that gets fixed, it is
indeed a trivial step with the added value that I can sign off the
commit as I do (and signed commits gives the benefit of a trusted
upgrade chain, as detailed in the introductory blog).

Now granted, there is no benefit if you do this "checking out for
review work" as a non-committer, because your signature, whether you
apply it or not, holds no value for the project.  However, there are
issues one can spot simply "by looking" as well as others that do
require actual research beyond building the package (such as "is this
software actually GPL'd" for example).  As for actually checking
whether the package builds, we could move more of that to QA, but I'm
not sure whether that'd be a benefit.

For "patch does not apply", the forge solution is typically to send a
notification to the issuer.  Sure, we could do that, we could even do
so automatically, but fixing one's own patch over and over against a
running target when there's no hope it'll get merged (for other issues
that are never pointed out, because you're coding for a bot) induces
even more cognitive overhead.

> Well, I am not saying that we should switch to PR model using
> GitHub. :-) Let just recognize that our current workflow has many
> drawbacks that make some frictions (steps with no value) for
> reviewing.  And PR model à la GitHub has many other drawbacks but at
> least it reduces some frictions (technical steps with no value);
> mainly because some people are paid for removing (or hide) these
> useless friction.
> 
> Don’t you agree that the review process implies many manual steps
> that have no value for the project?
I might actually disagree on the "many", but let's agree on "some" and
move on from there.

> Last, I agree that the main issue when speaking about the reviewing
> process is not about tooling.  The lack of a smooth technical
> solution is just acting as a chemical developing solution in
> photography, it increases the contrast and makes the poor image
> apparent.
Yeah, I don't get that metaphor.

Cheers