Re: New Package for NonGNU-ELPA: clojure-ts-mode

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 26/08/2023 23:14, Philip Kaludercic wrote:
> I only mention this, because I don't agree with the premise that this
> boils down to "mailing-list" or "web-interface".  While it is true that
> a lot of people are uncertain and afraid of sending a message to a
> mailing list, this fear is unreasonable and worth dispelling.

It's not so much a matter of being afraid. We're not squirrels. Using 
Debbugs is an exercise in frustration because a random user won't know 
how to respond to an existing issue (finding them is clunky, but 
doable), how to respond to a particular comment without having been 
subscribed to the mailing list previously (there's no way to do that, 
and it's a common feature in most bug trackers and discussion 
platforms), how to properly respond to an email from a bug tracker that 
does arrive in your inbox, how to avoid dropping people from 
conversations, how to avoid being dropped themselves at some point. And 
so on.

Anybody who doesn't have enough patience to google how to do the most 
basic things, we just don't see.

Another thing we're missing, is an easy-to-access list of most recent 
conversations and bug reports. Which for many projects partially serves 
as an invitation to join in, too (as long as it's easy to do from there).

> I think there is a reasonable point to be made that the CA prevents
> certain valuable contributions from entering Emacs/GNU ELPA.  IANAL, so
> I don't know if a sign-off procedure would be a sufficient alternative?
> But if I am a bit cynical, I cannot deny that having a CA-system can
> also help filtering out a lot of noise and low-quality code (I'd claim
> that the average quality of a ELPA package is higher than that of
> packages on MELPA...).

Virtually any barrier would increase the average quality of the code. If 
we required everybody to do fifty squats, film that, and attach together 
with the first patch submission, that would also increase the average 
quality, filtering out the less motivated.

I'm not sure the cost-benefit ratio is good, though.