Re: Metaproblem, part 3

[João Távora]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: address@hidden (João Távora)
>> Cc: address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden
>> Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 11:21:29 +0000
>> 
>> > Does it happen in private email instead of on the list?
>> 
>> I would say off-list, yes
>
> If that would help newcomers, it's easy to do.  OTOH, doing that on
> the list has the advantage that others can chime in and make
> alternative suggestions or draw attention to details that evaded the
> "main mentor".

An idea would be to prefix the subject line in the on-list dialog with
"[mentoring]" so people know that a newcomer is being tutored and so can
avoid contributing tangential matters or topics too advanced that will
confuse the effort. Ideally, only a maintainer or someone who is quite
sure of what he is about to say would pitch in with something like this:

    This 20-line contribution doesn't need a copyright assignment

    Don't make a feature branch for this particular one, share a link
    to you github/gitorious fork instead.

    Remember that the first line of the commit message should be in the
     XYZ format

    This contribution should be targeting ELPA, not Emacs.

These are all in the scope of red tape, and not exactly code review or
pertinence evaluation. Though in practice, and especially on-list, I
think it will be almost impossible to separate the two. I think it is
also not so desirable, so the mentor and maintainers alike should be
able to say things about code quality like from simple stuff like

    Remember to provide a docstring for this functions

to

    This has to be made to work with foo-mode and all the bar-related
    modes, that bit has to be redesigned. Have you tried using defbaz?

but everyone that sees a "[mentoring]" tag should generally avoid

    You could write a macro for that.

    Even though I'm not going to work with it, this is going to break my
    super-special use-case.

    This raises the greater question of the usefulness of quux-mode in
    general. Shouldn't we be trying to deprecate them instead using the
    zglorb-mode.?

We can leave those objections for the second phase, where perhaps the
subject like would read "[mentored]".

João