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

[Simon Tournier]

Hi Katherine,

I am fully aligned with the Survey proposal; at some past Guix Days I
remember discussing a kind of survey á la Haskell or Emacs surveys.
Well, such appears to me very informative to better know how to improve,
from user to contributor.

On Tue, 05 Sep 2023 at 12:00, Katherine Cox-Buday <cox.katherine.e@gmail.com> 
wrote:

> 1. A list of the issues
> 2. How we'll measure that they're issues
> 3. How we'll measure improvement against the issues
> 4. How we'll address the issues
>
> So often in my long career I've worked with organizations/people that 
> really want to skip to (5): implement something.
>
> Implement a vertically-integrated solution to gather feedback against 
> reality: yes. Jump straight to the "final solution" with all the details 
> managed: no.

Since I am French and it is easier for me to comment about my
disagreements than the converse. ;-)

In my career, I have seen the converse: spending plenty of time cooking
all the details of the plan and then being bitten by implementation
“details” that were impossible to predict beforehand.

Instead, I often see the incremental improvements more productive.
Especially when people are volunteers for their contributions and so
their motivation is variable and non-fungible.

I think we have

 #1. a list of issues; some points discussed in this thread
     could be reported as bugs.
 #4. an hope for addressing some of them using a plan (scripts, fix guix
     edit, etc.)

As we discussed earlier, the ’measures’ are the difficult part and there
is too many bias that it’s almost impossible to measure.  At best, the
number of contributors (#2) and some stats from some survey (#3) would
provide some indicators.

Maybe I misread, I think we have a consensus about the issues and
about the concrete actionable next steps, no?

 a. Prepare a survey
 b. Report bugs about “guix style” and “guix edit” (and I am probably
    missing other reported in the thread :-))
 c. Look to Build Coordinator and QA [A,B] (ask Chris?) and try to
    extract what this CI does.

Well, from what my opinion is worth here.

A: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/build-coordinator.git
B: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/qa-frontpage.git/


[...]

> So are we unintentionally filtering out contributions from people with 
> compromised executive functioning?

For all the rest, I mostly agree with your words.

Cheers,
simon