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

[Wilko Meyer]

Hi Attila,

Attila Lendvai <attila@lendvai.name> writes:

> i couldn't even find out which tools are used by those who are
> comfortable with the email based workflow. i looked around once, even
> in the manual, but maybe i should look again.

I can only speak for myself here, but I tend to use magit[0] from inside
emacs for most of these things (sometimes git format-patch and git
send-email directly on my shell). In magit there's:

- magit-am-* to apply patches[1]
- the magit-patch-popup to create patches[2]

I've written a few elisp functions on top of that, to be able to
e.g. directly apply a patch from a mail I've received (I use mu4e[3] as
my mail client) more conveniently. My set-up is far from being perfect
and quite simple, but more often than not perfectly enough for most of
my contributions to mail based projects.

More generally speaking, there's a pretty good tutorial[4] on
git-send-email written by the sourcehut folks, which also includes steps
on how to get git-send-email going on Guix. I usually refer to that when
being asked how to get started with a email based git workflow (I'm by
no means an expert on using said workflow (so I'd also be interested on
how said workflow looks like for other people on this mailing list), I
however do know enough to ocassionally use it conveniently enough for my
use-cases).

[0]: https://magit.vc
[1]: https://magit.vc/manual/magit/Maildir-Patches.html
[2]: https://magit.vc/manual/2.13.0/magit/Creating-and-Sending-Patches.html
[3]: https://djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html
[4]: https://git-send-email.io/

Best Regards,

Wilko Meyer