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

[Csepp]

Giovanni Biscuolo <g@xelera.eu> writes:

> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
> Hello Katherine,
>
> thank you for having summarized (part of) this thread in a list of
> actionable tasks
>
> now Someone™ have the chance to decrease the cognitive overhead for
> contributors by _increasing_ her cognitive overhead to sort out and
> complete each task
>
> as a general comment, it seems to me that you put very much attention to
> the process of contributing v1 of a patch but you underestimate the
> cognitive overhead of the collective patch reviewing process and
> committing to Guix proper process
>
> AFAIU, observing what is happening in Guix since 2019, what is actually
> critical for Guix is _not_ the cognitive overhead needed to send a patch
> to guix-devel, but what comes after and _around_.
>
> last but not least, to be fair we should see at what other distribution
> (not single software projects) are doing for their contributing process:
> I know a little about Debian and in my experience it's far easier to
> contribute to Guix than to Debian (but I know little, I emphasize)
>
> Katherine Cox-Buday <cox.katherine.e@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Summary of my conclusions:
>>
>> 1. We should use sourcehut or continue to improve mumi
>
> Please forgive me if I insist, but the one and _only_ benefit of using
> SourceHut is the web-UI /helper/ to prepare an email message to send,
> it's "just" a web-UI version of the "git format-patch" CLI; the rest of
> the "patch management workflow" is email **and** CLI (git am) based;
> it's documented.
>
> Furthermore, users that are comfortable with the SourceHut web UI are
> free to use that as their personal working repo, there is no need for
> Guix to use a SourceHut remote as the official one.

How easy related issues are to find matters a great deal.  So does TODO
management.
Mumi currently fails at its main function of being a search engine for
issues.  I can't even find my own messages with keyword searches,
because for some reason Mumi connects each words with a logical or and
doesn't rank search results based on how many hits there are, not to
mention handling fuzzy hits, or synonyms, etc.

As I see it, this is an issue of developer resources.  Mumi and Debbugs
have no chance of catching up to any alterntive that already has a
sustainable financial model and professional developers working on it.

Why are we trying to compete with Sourcehut?  What's the end goal?