Hi Guix, I’m new to email based contributing to FOSS projects, as this is something I discovered when I started contributing to guix. In my (short) experience, exchanging emails, along with the right tools, is way more convenient to any other web based workflow I’m aware of, including habitual pr / mr with usual suspects and mainstream forges.
As for today, sending patches, issues, bugs, tracking, etc. feels more
natural to me than creating accounts, going through tabs and pages,
and pushing buttons, even if more popular. For sure, the email workflow
rises the entrance level to contributing to guix: it looks weird and
takes some time until one feels at home with it.
Guix documentation is clear and concise, but obviously agnostic about
workflows. As a newly, I started with a local clone, and a different
branch per contribution. I used to keep a copy of all email threads,
trying to organise them somehow, to follow conversations, reply with
inline comments, indexing and searching, etc. A real mess.
At this point, I’m just curious about how people handle their email
based workflow. In my case, some time later on I discovered
yhetil.org: the full history of email exchanged at my hands. Easy to
search and to follow from emacs and eww. Appropriate links to the
whole thread, mbox, replies, etc. Clean coupling with rmail, one click
away from being prompted for a contribution using my favourite email
client.
To get an overview of the full thread, I’m using this simple snippet:
(defun csb/eww-yhetil ()
"Ensure we use nested threads before calling ‘consult-outline’."
(interactive)
(let ((_current_url (plist-get eww-data :url)))
(unless (string-suffix-p "/t/#u" _current_url)
(eww (format "%st/#u" _current_url)))
(sit-for 1)
(consult-outline 2)))
which allows filtering messages by author. Searching is a breeze.
From yhetil, patches may be applied from mbox files or using mumi.
Forget having tones of local emails.
For sure, my contributions are simple, and I don’t have much
experience, and yet, yhetil.org helps a lot. Really, thanks to the
author ! It’s hard to me to imagine more complex scenarios. And so my
question about how do other contributors to guix manage to handle
their email based workflow as for today, in case there is other yhetil
equivalent around which might help.
Best,
--
Cayetano Santos
.
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