Dear all, Over the last few months I have felt an increasing level of concern over the lack of response to patches. This email is rather long, but please, bear with me. The goal is to start a discussion on the problems this creates, and consider short and long-term solutions.
When both community and maintainer response to new patches is lacking, many first-time contributors are actively dissuaded from contributing again. Furthermore, each patch represents a considerable time investment --- particularly if it's from an individual who is new to the mailing list / patch workflow. Org-mode is not "done" and still requires the support of long-term contributors to keep improving, anything that discourages them from contributing back to the community needs to be carefully understood and resolved if we want to continue harmoniously. Take for example Jay Bosamiya's patch from September last year [1]. It appears to be his first submission to this mailing list, and yet there has been absolutely no response to it. There are currently 24 other patches listed on the updates.orgmode.org which have seen no response from this community, some of which are from first-time contributors. There are 36 other patches with at least two replies, but yet to be resolved. Bastien's updates.orgmode.org is fantastic in helping prevent contributions slip through the cracks, but it is also highlighting the lack of community response to a significant number of patches. This mailing list was my first experience with an email+patch based contribution workflow. Thankfully, I received prompt and friendly feedback and was guided through the adjustments needed so it could be merged in a timely manner. Should my patch have been similarly ignored, I would have been quite disheartened; it is not an overstatement to say I would likely have written off this mailing list and not tried again. Simply put, this is not good enough. This does a disservice to those that have dedicated time and effort to try and better this project only to be ignored. Not rejected, not even acknowledged, nothing. It is imperative that this community improves our response to contributions for the long-term health of this project. Do not take me to be a doomsayer; I have faith that Org is going to keep on improving regardless. However, failing to welcome and encourage contributors has a deleterious effect on the health of the project. I do not blame the maintainers in the slightest. As Bastien brought up in a recent worg discussion, as time goes on we find ourselves taking on more and more life responsibilities. Therefore it's in our best interest to delegate some of the maintainer responsibilities to consistently active, and supportive community members to "pass down the torch" so the community and platform can continue to expand with grace and care. What can the community do? I don't know of any silver bullet, but I believe there are some steps which could help, namely: + The development and publication of "reasonable expectations" which contributors should have when submitting a patch, and that the maintainers should strive to uphold (e.g. "expect a response within <some timeframe>"). + A community effort/sprint to respond to those patches that have been seemingly abandoned + Onboarding of new maintainers, when reasonable and suitable candidates exist (I'd very willingly throw my hat in the ring for consideration). If it's too much work, spread it out as much as possible. If any other ideas come to mind, please share them so we can discuss them further. Finally, it's not all bad. While this discussion has called for some criticism, I don't want to give the false impression that I think nothing is working and nobody is supporting contributors. This is not the case at all, there are some standout individuals one the mailing list who have been fantastic. Kudos to you all. My best to everyone, Timothy [1] https://orgmode.org/list/caoywxzg1cbl07thlzxhbbczm6te2vmtqnmm0w63331gybrj...@mail.gmail.com/ [2] https://orgmode.org/list/87h7qi2l2m....@gmail.com/
