On Tue, Nov 12, 2019 at 08:11:06PM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Hi Emily,

On Fri, 8 Nov 2019, Emily Shaffer wrote:

quoted

It seems to me that the friendly template text we prefill when someone
opens a pull request in github.com/git/git isn't being fully appreciated
by many interested contributors.

That is probably due to our confusing use of the template as a stop sign
;-)

quoted

For some time now, Johannes has been slogging through the list to try
to narrow it down to folks who are still interested in contributing,
and yesterday on #git-devel said he was pretty happy with the progress
so far.

I don't mind it, and quite honestly, it does not take a lot of time,
most of the time.

quoted

But to me, this seems like a sort of Sisyphean task - more folks will
want to make contributions and not read the template text, and we will
have more PRs being ignored forever, especially if Johannes decides he
doesn't want to shepherd those changes anymore (I would have decided
that long ago, in his shoes).

The PRs are not bad. What is bad is all those comments on commits coming
in as of recent, some developers thinking that they do not need to
research the best way to reach the Git contributor community and instead
just assuming that adding comments via GitHub's UI is a valid way.

I should probably refrain from trying to help those developers because
it makes me very cranky, but I just don't want Git to be an unfriendly
project.

I guess my concern is this: when I reply to some code review, email,
whatever, when I am cranky, it makes me seem unfriendly; when I do so
while wearing a maintainership hat (I maintain another project
elsewhere) it makes my project seem unfriendly :) Besides, I don't think
that anybody wants a contributor to be regularly doing work that makes
them cranky.

quoted

PS: Today we have 17 PRs open against git/git, and I think all of them
have been nudged by dscho in comments to open against GGG instead. Many
are in a state where dscho is sending a ping every few weeks to see if
the committer is interested in following through.

https://github.com/git/git/pulls

They all have been nudged, sometimes to clean up the patch first, or to
suggest that maybe the goal of the PR might not be all that desirable.

Some of the PRs probably can be closed, but as I said, I would like to
think of Git as a friendly project, a helpful one, so I want to err in
favor of talking to the contributors rather than shutting the door in
their face, so to say.

I do agree that meeting a patient human instead of silence is a good
contributor experience, and I appreciate all the work you're putting in
that direction.

 - Emily