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

[Simon Tournier]

Hi,

On Fri, 25 Aug 2023 at 09:31, Attila Lendvai <attila@lendvai.name> wrote:

> another thing worth pointing out here is that the harder it is to test
> a submitted patchset locally, the fewer non-committer reviews will
> happen.

First, please note that thanks to tireless Chris work about QA, testing
is not hard!  Currently, it is poorly documented.  For instance, you can
test using:

    guix time-machine \
      --url=https://git.guix-patches.cbaines.net/git/guix-patches \
      --branch=issue-123456 --disable-authentication \
      -- build <foo>

As discussed in the thread,

        Re: Update on automating testing of patches and qa.guix.gnu.org
        Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net>
        Mon, 07 Nov 2022 10:36:13 +0100
        id:877d07f6d5.fsf@cbaines.net
        https://yhetil.org/guix/877d07f6d5.fsf@cbaines.net
        https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2022-11

indeed, the pluming details could be hidden under a new Guix subcommand
or via a new Mumi subcommand.

Any help is welcome. :-)

Second, the bottleneck about reviewing and merging is not about how
difficult or easy it is, instead it is because that’s a boring task that
barely fixes the immediate annoyances.  Somehow, the root of the issue
is the feeling of “being accountable”.  Since the motivation is not
fungible, there is not easy and straightforward solution.  From my point
of view, what is behind Teams is one direction for trying to improve the
bottleneck about reviewing.

Cheers,
simon