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Comment by thayne

10 months ago

I've contributed to a couple of projects that use email based workflows. I can customize my environment, but it takes a lot of time, and I would rather do something else than figure out how to filter the firehose of a mailing list to the few emails I actually care about, or learn how to use a new email client that is slightly better and handling patches.

The first few times, it took me longer to figure out how to send a patch than it did to fix the bug I was writing a patch for.

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thayne

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db48x  10 months ago

But you only have to figure that out once. Amortized over many contributions the cost is essentially nothing.

  • solarkraft  10 months ago

    But the initial cost is what determines whether the first patch will ever be sent, so the amortization may never happen.

    • db48x  10 months ago

      I guess technically that’s true, but it cannot possibly take long to learn how to use `git format-patch`, and everyone should already know how to attach a file to an email. Even if you have to spend half an hour reading the entire output of `git format-patch --help`, is that really enough to prevent you from sending your first patch?

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