Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Posted Sep 2, 2021 7:28 UTC (Thu) by beshr (guest, #133204)Parent article: Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Git has a pretty good tutorial on how to contribute via mailing lists (docs/MyFirstContribution). If you'd like to find out if it's really that daunting of a task, try to find some typo in the documentation and submit a patch.
Posted Sep 2, 2021 11:31 UTC (Thu)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (28 responses)
Struggled a lot, actually. It's really hard for the beginner to grok GitHub. But they are doing it with the knowledge that they have hundreds (or thousands) projects hosted there and if they learn to use it they can ask about or contribute to all of them easily. If they would learn how to contribute to the Emacs… they would be able to contribute to Emacs. Not even other GNU projects use the same tools (some of them use similar ones, but they all are subtly different).
IOW: GitHub attracts people precisely and exactly for the very same reason Emacs developers don't like to use it — dependence on some central place which enforces uniformity. Compared to what? Compared to GitHub based project? Difficult. You need to learn a lot of lore which would only be applicable to that particular project. That's not something casual contributors can be bothered to learn. And while stance “we don't need these two-line patches, we need commitment” may sound reasonable in reality it doesn't work like that. Most developers start out as casual contributors, if you send them away then where would people with commitment come from?
Posted Sep 2, 2021 11:56 UTC (Thu)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (1 responses)
With the requirement to do paperwork first to assign copyright, they aren't really likely getting two line patches anyway. Commitment becomes an upfront requirement, not merely because of infrastructure.
Posted Sep 2, 2021 12:19 UTC (Thu)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
I have committed two-line patches in various GNU projects without any copyright assignments (not in Emacs, though). You only need assignment when you contribution is large enough to be copyrightable in the first place. Yes, actual patches were submitted by others and included tests, entries in ChangeLogs and so on… I, basically, only reported the problem and possible fix… precisely and exactly what you may expect from someone without commitment… Wrangling with bugzilla/mailing lists/etc was MUCH bigger hassle than spotting and fixing the actual problem.
Posted Sep 2, 2021 13:30 UTC (Thu)
by beshr (guest, #133204)
[Link] (25 responses)
That's not exactly true. Contributing via patches to mailing-lists, writing the cover-letter, setting up cli email sending or via emacs, will help to contribute to any other project that uses the same method. The knowledge gained is not specific to emacs dev, like contributing to Git for example. The specifics of each group's requirement might be different tho. There's value in variety.
> Compared to what? Compared to GitHub based project? Difficult.
I sort of disagree, sure if you're fixing a typo and you don't have any setup for mailing-list contribution, maybe that'd be true (not that that's not a valuable contrib). What I actually meant was in the rest of my original comment. I meant compared to learning how to get comfortable with Git, bash, navigating their way around gdb, etc... My point is that they're all difficult to the uninitiated, and altho may seem like skills don't transfer, in reality they do. The more you learn about similar things the easier it gets to learn about other similar things.
Posted Sep 2, 2021 14:04 UTC (Thu)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (5 responses)
True, but for the most contributors out there all these tools required to even start are significantly more complicated when mailing lists are involved. To report an issue in GitHub you don't need to know how to use git, you don't need to know how to generate patches, you don't need to even find out where to even send these patches! Imagine that I'm novice and want to just create an issue for, IDK, rust compiler (just since we talked so much about it recently). What should I do? Well… type “rust sources” in browser, look on the first link, navigate sources, click on the line which you find questionable, pick “reference in a new issue”, write something. Try to do the same with Emacs and see how many click would you need to achieve the same result. Not for the first-time contributor. For them every additional mouse click counts. I have tried to do the same exercise with Emacs. Not only I have to pick 3rd result in Google and few other non-trivial choices. But even when I arrive at the point where I can actually see the source… I'm stuck. I have no idea what to do… I can click as much as I want — noone would ask me to create an account, noone would offer me to create an issue. Dead end. What does that mean, ultimately? That means that if someone who is not yet a software developer would try to contribute into any project it would be GitHub or GitLab or something like that. They would initially fail to contribute to any project on any platform, of course. But the first success would be, undoubtedly there, where you don't need to learn anything and where the only skill required is to write some code and to know how to use mouse. They would engage in working with developers before they would learn how to use Git or Mail or any other “complicated” tool. And by the time they would be savvy enough to even contemplate to contribute to Emacs GitHub would be something they know and love and all these mailing lists would be a scary mystery.
Posted Sep 3, 2021 12:05 UTC (Fri)
by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039)
[Link] (4 responses)
This seems to be a bizarre way to go about reporting a bug. If I wanted to report a bug in Emacs I'd type "report a bug in emacs" into my search engine, and lo, detailed instructions are the first result.
Posted Sep 3, 2021 12:24 UTC (Fri)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (3 responses)
“Detailed instructions”? Like that one? Not “click here, type text there” actionable form? You have lost that [potential future] contributor then and there. I beg you. Visit any local college. Computer Science department. Talk to first-year students there. Try to ask how many of them would use e-mail for anything — and note what said “anything” is. You may be surprised. For the new generation e-mail is not something they use to communicate with “normal” humans. They receive confirmations from the web sites there and, sometimes, send official letters (which, for obvious reasons, teaches them not to do that often because consequences can be dire). You may lament it as much as you want but that's just the fact of life: for the “new generation” e-mail is not a tool which they use to communicate with humans. All these “pages with detailed instructions” which I can find ignore that completely. Again: I'm not saying it's wrong. If Emacs developers want to use that barrier to keep “uninitiated” away, then it may even be Ok. But then, why complain that there are not enough developers? You, themselves, made it impossible for them to find and join the emacs team (or, for that matter, start using Emacs at all). Note that “vim bug report” sends you not to the page with “detailed instructions” but to this page — with list of known issues (seachable) and helpful green “new issue” button.
Posted Sep 3, 2021 13:15 UTC (Fri)
by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039)
[Link] (2 responses)
I'm not saying the Emacs way is easy. I did only a cursory reading of the instructions I found <https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/efaq/...> and, finding that it involved using Emacs, concluded it would probably make sense to an Emacs user (which I am not).
My point is that if I'm a first-time contributor, looking for the line of source on the Web (if you're a programmer, you probably have the source locally; if not a programmer, you're not going to go looking through the source) is not the way I'd go about trying to report a bug, and I'd hazard few people would do it that way.
You were judging Emacs' process based on the back roads rather than the main thoroughfare, and that's a terrible way to make an argument.
Posted Sep 3, 2021 13:49 UTC (Fri)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (1 responses)
So… you have found the page and haven't actually bothered to actually read it? Let me do that for you: These instructions made perfect sense quarter-century ago. When most Unix systems had working e-mail setup and Windows was in it's infancy. Today most novice developers use Windows (even if they are WSL users) and even rare ones who actually use Linux mostly don't have functioning mail setup on their workstations thus there would most definitely no “reliable return address”, and, most likely, bug-report sent with the use of that instruction would be delivered straight to /dev/null. To realize how outdates and pointless these instructions are I want to point out that even LWN (and it's very old-fashioned web-site by today's standards) doesn't have any idea what to do with news: URL. Again. Please try to talk to first year students some time. This is exactly how they would try to do that. For them browser (and also mobile phone apps) is how they communicate. If they are emacs users then probably mobile phone apps are not that important, but e-mail is not something they use often and even if they use it they don have functioning MTA on their system, they use browser to receive and send emails. Yes, I may not be 100% correct in trying to imagine how they would try to reach emacs developers, but it's just the fact that all venues which are on official sites wouldn't make any sense for them. They include use of certain tools which they have no idea about. Worse: many of them assume certain things about local machine setup which are not true in today's world and weren't true for many years. Heck, I'm not first-year student and I don't have my system setup in way which would allow me to use an official way of reporting bugs! I could probably tune it but why bother? I was just trying to imitate what my 20-25 year friends did when they tried to report bugs in some software (not emacs, obviously, none of them use emacs and most of them even have any idea it exists). You have page which even worse. If that is “the main thoroughfare” then it's no wonder that emacs doesn't get many contributors.
Posted Sep 3, 2021 16:33 UTC (Fri)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link]
I think a key thing that's going on here gets back to the idea that emacs is almost its own operating system. It has a mail client built in, and the hardcore developers use it as their way of accessing email. They naturally assume that anyone who cares enough about emacs to want to contribute to it will do likewise. It's a wrong assumption, but one can understand how they would make it. After all, every emacs developer they know works that way. They're so far outside the mainstream, they have no idea what the mainstream even looks like, and they are uninterested in finding out.
Posted Sep 2, 2021 17:11 UTC (Thu)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link] (18 responses)
Knowing how to drive a stick-shift car means you can drive any stick, not just the one your fuddy-duddy uncle happens to own. I'm sure you can find lots of other fuddy-duddy uncles who drive sticks, and borrow their cars, too!
(This is the American perspective, where to a first approximation, everyone drives an automatic, and many people have never driven a stick. In Europe, for reasons which are unclear to me, everyone drives a stick.)
Seriously: I know this probably does help people contribute to e.g. Linux and a couple of other projects. But ultimately, the developer gets to decide what is and is not worth their time. Increasingly, they are deciding that email is not worth their time. You can meet them where they are, or you can lose out on their potential contributions. In a voluntary project where nobody gets paid, that's the hard and harsh reality of the situation. Arguing about *why* developers don't want to use email is a completely non-sequitur, because the reasons don't actually matter. The question, instead, is which of those two choices the project is going to make: Meet developers where they are, or don't.
Posted Sep 2, 2021 17:27 UTC (Thu)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (2 responses)
That's actually very simple: in US you need to drive to be able to work and live independently. And when you have no choice then picking the easiest route is “obvious”. In Europe there are no need drive at all. You do that because you want to, not because you have to. It's cheaper to live without a car. And then it becomes a stance: yes, I can and want to own a car, see? Of course the ability to own and drive more complicated car with a stick sends even stronger message thus this is what you end up doing. I guess use of e-mail to drive development of Emacs sends similar message: we have no need or want to deal with these these pesky users of IDEs and browsers, only “real”, “hardcode” developers. And absolutely no compromises! Who may want to have an ersatz-emacs in VSCode or Eclipse? These are not pure enough! If that is what Emacs developers want to achieve then using e-mail driven development maybe be a good choice, actually.
Posted Sep 3, 2021 13:37 UTC (Fri)
by Sesse (subscriber, #53779)
[Link]
(I don't have one, and not even a driver's license, but I live in a city, and I occasionally miss having one.)
Posted Sep 3, 2021 17:20 UTC (Fri)
by JanC_ (guest, #34940)
[Link]
Larger/luxury cars always were much more commonly sold with an automatic, and of course hybrid & electrical cars (usually?) have them too…
Posted Sep 2, 2021 19:12 UTC (Thu)
by beshr (guest, #133204)
[Link] (1 responses)
That's not exactly the argument. My understanding is is that this is usually proposed as a change to "help attract others" by other members who may or may not be current contributors, so the proposition is not directly coming from people who: check out the source code, look at something they'd like to fix or change, think about contributing it back, and then get hit with the mailing-list while, but is actually from people who are thinking growth (which is not necessarily bad or wrong).
> Increasingly, they are deciding that email is not worth their time.
There's not much decision going on without trying. I'm not saying that everyone needs to be forced to do mailing-list contribution for a month or that choosing not to go that route is wrong. If some project decides to switch to Github to get more of that crowd then good for them, but compelling all projects to be uniform (in the name of the newcomers) is the thing that I'm against.
Posted Sep 2, 2021 22:15 UTC (Thu)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link]
* Whether those concerns are real or imagined, in the specific case of Emacs.
For example, I very much doubt they are going to move to GitHub given the FSF's stance towards its use of Javascript etc., and that probably does cost them a significant amount of developer visibility. But GitHub goes against their core philosophical values too strongly, so this reduced visibility is outweighed. Personally, I happen to disagree with both their philosophy and the relative importance they place on it, but it's their project and their values, not mine. What's important is that they make an informed decision based on the available evidence, rather than some ill-conceived notion that everyone "has to" use GitHub.
Posted Sep 2, 2021 20:10 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (9 responses)
Less so nowadays, but sticks are noticeably more efficient (greater mpg), and fuel is a *LOT* more expensive.
Cheers,
Posted Sep 2, 2021 22:30 UTC (Thu)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (4 responses)
In recent years, in the real world, automatics are more fuel efficient than the average people driving a stick (which itself is a tiny percentage in the US). If you do a comparison with hybrids, there is no competition at all. Fuel emission standards in US are why there is very little manuals even being sold in US and the market is increasingly gearing towards hybrids.
Posted Sep 3, 2021 7:13 UTC (Fri)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (3 responses)
Yes, I think the fuel efficiency argument is no longer true. However, it's a manual transmission is a lot simpler and cheaper to fix than an automatic transmission (where if something goes wrong, you pretty much just replace the whole thing.
I drive a stick and I'll be sad if/when stickshifts become unavailable here in Canada. Coincidentally, I also use emacs. And I'm in my 50s. I wonder if those things are correlated?
Posted Sep 3, 2021 9:18 UTC (Fri)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (2 responses)
Here in Germany, most people learn to drive stick in driving school – in fact it used to be the case that if you passed your driving test on an automatic, your license would be restricted so you could only ever drive automatics, which given that they're fairly rare hereabouts would be quite inconvenient.
Automatics, apart from being more expensive and less fuel-efficient, used to be seen mostly as cars for the elderly and/or medically impaired, but especially with electric cars and driver's assistance systems tied to automatics being on the rise, attitudes are changing. The law was recently changed to make it easier for holders of automatic-only licenses to transition to stick shift after all; presumably this is in preparation of a time when most cars will not have a manual transmission, driver's ed will take place mostly on such cars, and stick shift will become more of a curiosity for people with specialised or vintage vehicles.
Posted Sep 3, 2021 10:17 UTC (Fri)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (1 responses)
That's European regs. Class B is stick shift, or there's Class B (auto) for automatics only. Which one you get depends on what sort of vehicle you take your test in - upgrading is a simple matter of retaking your test in a stick. That said, retaking your test is probably "fun" for an experienced driver because of all the bad habits you'vve picked up ... :-)
Cheers,
Posted Sep 4, 2021 19:10 UTC (Sat)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
As a matter of fact, here in Germany the law was recently changed to say that if you take your driving test on an automatic, you don't have to take another driving test (with an official examiner in the rear seat) in order to be allowed to drive stick. To get your license amended, all you need to do now is present a certificate from a driving school saying that you took a certain number of lessons in driving stick and managed it to the driving teacher's satisfaction.
Posted Sep 3, 2021 9:36 UTC (Fri)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (3 responses)
Not true of the last ten years or so - automatics are more fuel efficient nowadays. Two reasons:
Of course, electric cars resolve this by getting high fuel economy with a fixed gear train instead of using a gearbox - but that's a whole different story.
Posted Sep 3, 2021 17:28 UTC (Fri)
by JanC_ (guest, #34940)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 3, 2021 22:48 UTC (Fri)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 7, 2021 1:09 UTC (Tue)
by JanC_ (guest, #34940)
[Link]
I suppose something similar could also be useful for e.g. electric trucks.
Hybrids are more likely to use something like a CVT, from what I understand.
Posted Sep 3, 2021 2:23 UTC (Fri)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (1 responses)
Nice naiveté! First, there are old cars without synchromeshes where you need to over-rev engine before switching the gears. Second, there are cars with nonstandard switching scheme.
Posted Sep 3, 2021 10:26 UTC (Fri)
by amacater (subscriber, #790)
[Link]
Posted Sep 3, 2021 16:35 UTC (Fri)
by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
[Link]
Gas is several times more expensive in many European countries (taxes) and old, non-computerized automatic gearboxes are very inefficient. I think they are also more expensive to manufacture and maintain than a manual.
I'm sure there are cultural aspects too. After driving sticks for many years it was very hard for me to get used to the sluggish response of "slushboxes": when the car _slows down_ first when you press hard on the gas because it downshifts first. In general it really feels like losing control - because it is.
I don't think slushboxes will ever sell much in Europe but newer, computer-control "automated manuals" are gaining ground.
(totally off-topic sorry)
Posted Sep 2, 2021 22:03 UTC (Thu)
by rodgerd (guest, #58896)
[Link] (1 responses)
No-one is asking you to. But don't whine about it when no-one shows up to work on your project.
Posted Sep 2, 2021 22:58 UTC (Thu)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
What makes you think I expect anyone to "show up to work on my project" ?
Similarly, why should I care what other folks choose to spend their time on?
This isn't a zero-sum popularity contest; it's about software that has never held anything other than niche appeal, even during its supposed heydey.
> Surely they had to struggle a bit when they first started to use Git for example, but they persevered and now they know more than they knew then.
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
> The more you learn about similar things the easier it gets to learn about other similar things.
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
> I'd type "report a bug in emacs" into my search engine, and lo, detailed instructions are the first result.
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
> I did only a cursory reading of the instructions I found <https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/efaq/...> and, finding that it involved using Emacs, concluded it would probably make sense to an Emacs user (which I am not).
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
M-x report-emacs-bug. It sets up a mail buffer with the essential information and the correct e-mail address, bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Anything sent there also appears in the newsgroup news:gnu.emacs.bug, but please use e-mail instead of news to submit the bug report. This ensures a reliable return address so you can be contacted for further details.
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
> This is the American perspective, where to a first approximation, everyone drives an automatic, and many people have never driven a stick. In Europe, for reasons which are unclear to me, everyone drives a stick.
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
* To the extent they are real, the likely consequences of sticking with email.
* The likely consequences of switching to a forge-based workflow, including the negative consequences.
* How to weigh those consequences against one another.
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Wol
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Wol
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows - Offtopic on gear changes
From Emacs to automatic gearboxes
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows
Emacs discusses web-based development workflows