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Comment by gkya | Hacker News Reader

This is FUD. There are sensible responses to this comment, so I won't write a new one, but say one thing: You don't know how to use conventional tools, and and go on to blindly rant about them.

> Basically, e-mail is the death of any sort of low-effort contribution. If you're starting a new project, and chose a mailing list, you're probably excluding a huge quantity of potential contributors.

If those contributors are as incompetent to not be able to mail a patch, I'd rather be happy to have excluded them.

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> You don't know how to use conventional tools, and and go on to blindly rant

That crosses into personal attack and incivility, which breaks the HN guidelines regardless of how wrong someone else is. Please don't post like this here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13631069 and marked it off-topic.

I think the core issue with your response is, unless the project in question is the "conventional tools", why do you seem to think knowing those tools is even germane to the quality of someone's contributions?

I write python and some C++ stuff for fun in my free time. If your project interests me, but I have to spend said free time to learn esoteric tools to interact with it that aren't needed elsewhere in my life, how do you figure that's valid?

It's not that I couldn't learn to deal with that kind of shit, it's that I don't see why I should bother. If everything else works without e-mailed diffs, all that does is make anyone with more then one hobby project do is look elsewhere.

One way or another, one has to learn the conventional communication tools if they want to contribute to any open-source project, be it GitHub or GitLab, or a mailing list and debbugs. The maintainers get to decide and it's their way or the highway. The project is theirs.

Some skills only serve one purpose. Like shaving. I learnt how to shave when I was a teen, and that skill has only been useful to me in shaving my face, since ten years. And being able to use email and diffs is a transferable skill.

I won't respond to you anymore, as I dislike your language and your contributions are trollish.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13632352 . It's not a simple matter of just sending an email. You can't send patches via gmail (because it autoconverts tabs to spaces), and setting up a client is involved, hard (impossible for some), and should be totally unnecessary.

I despise this "I'm happy to exclude people too incompetent to do X" attitude. I often mentor people into FOSS. They start off pretty incompetent with the tooling. With a bit of nudging they end up making high quality contributions. A person's usage of email has no bearing on their, say, Python skills. Nor does a person's usage of GitHub. These are tools to get the job done, they are not the job themselves. Tools should be easy to use. Github isn't exactly easy, but it's much easier than patch MLs.

Can't say that matches my experience, I've never encountered any problems with sending patches as an attachment. And find the process simpler than github.

If you send a patch as an attachment to a Linux kernel list, or most of the mailing-list-based projects I contribute to, it will almost certainly be insta-NACKed: maintainers are basically too busy to deal with anything that doesn't exactly match what git-send-email generates.

From a maintainer POV this is honestly perfectly fair - we have tooling like Patchwork that depends on patches being submitted inline. From a first-time contributor POV, this just puts the barrier to entry up even higher. :(

It's not a matter of competence, it's a matter of effort. With github, most things are easily discoverable. With email workflow, you have to relearn a whole black boxed, badly documented custom workflow that you will get wrong several times.

When I spent 15 hours writing a high quality patch for free, I don't want to spend 5 hours more just to send it. I have a life.

Its really obnoxious how many people hate doing things the easy, simple way, apparently just to feel superior.

I once was giving a training getting bored, so I timed how long it took for the dev to write down some simple tasks. The guys using vim and emacs were consistently slower than the guys with the IDE with GUIs.

I get that you can like vim and emacs better, and it's perfectly alright. But don't pretend it's more efficient. There are very few people (I meet one maybe each year) actually efficient with them because they are tools putting the burden of many tasks (reminding states, doing transitions, making very specific selections) on the user instead of the machine.

What language were you using? I wouldn't be too surprised about this if you were using Java or some other language with a lot of boilerplate but I'd be really surprised if this were true of python or a lisp: I'm pretty sure I can finish a simple script in vim in roughly the amount of time it takes to startup an IDE and start a new project. Also, were you letting people use their own vim setup or just a generic one?

Python or JS depending of the training.

People used their laptop.

The others were using PyCharm, notepad++ or Sublime Text.

Users of notepad are the slowest of all though. They are usually beginners.

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