>I really like Guix, I like what it promises, I love the community around it, and that's what keeps me here. But it's a >deeply frustrating experience to try to contribute to. I've been a contributor in various forms to a great many free >and open source software projects over the years, and Guix is easily one of the worst in that regard.
This aligns with somewhat with my (limited) experience. I'm a massive fan of Guix, but I did find the process a bit opaque; even after seeking clarification from the mailists, and some of my patches eventually fell through the cracks, or in other cases, someone would kindly submit on my behalf. That's really nice of them to do, but it's obviously not the way things should work. I've contributed to other Guix channels (some run by people closely affiliated with Guix proper) and other open source projects and found the overhead is usually no more than few minutes to read/follow to the how-to guide. I don't have a favourite forge nor a specific process I want to promote - but it should be easy and require little effort to understand and setup. Really the typical use-case should be close to push-button - with the focus being on reviewing the contribution rather than the mechanics of how this is done. I (and other colleagues) have a bunch of core enhancements, and quite a few packages sat in my (now previous) company's Guix channel that would be great to get into Guix proper (if the wider community deem them appropriate/useful of course!), but the overhead means we kept avoiding getting this done and the company runs off a lagged fork of Guix they manually update and rebase themselves, rather than pushing their work upstream into Guix. I 100% accept failing to get patches into Guix proper is also lethargy on my behalf, and perhaps I'm guilty of carping rather than proactively helping, but in choosing what to contribute to, and when spare-time is sadly limited, the amount of overhead and chasing required both become inevitable considerations on where to focus time.
