Re: Concerns about community contributor support

[D <d.williams@posteo.net>]

Hi Timothy,

I was quite weary to bring up this point, but given the sheer volume of
patch-related exchanges in recent memory I feel that it may be worth
bringing up as I have not yet seen it discussed (if I overlooked it, my
apologies): I don't think the core problem can (or maybe should) be
solved by sheer manpower alone.  I would argue that the issue may be
partially infrastructural in nature.  This ML is incredibly active, with
a lot of different people surely following it for different reasons.
However, I am not entirely convinced that having patches, bug reports
and general discussions all in one place is necessarily a net positive
for people wanting to contribute to the project (once a project hits a
certain size, at least).  It lacks a certain separation of concerns that
clearly informed the design of forges like GitHub (having separate
"Issues" and "PRs").

I may be alone with this opinion, given manually organizing is a
personal weakness of mine, and something I prefer to avoid at all costs,
but I think having a separate list for patches would greatly improve
their visibility without having to resort to band-aids like automated
subject-based filtering schemes which are thwarted by mundane human
error ("[PTACH]").  On the other hand, were I completely alone with this
opinion, then we wouldn't have dozens of emacs-* mailing lists already.

TL;DR: Maybe we could improve the visibility of patches by having a
dedicated mailing list for them? This would also allow for a greater
deal of automation in the way we deal with patches.

Cheers,
D.