On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 11:08:00PM +0000, Roberto Tyley wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Mar 2019 at 21:34, Jeff King <[email protected]> wrote:
> ...
> > We could continue to mention _both_ tools, but it's probably better to
> > pick one in order to avoid overwhelming the user with choice. After all,
> > one of the purposes here is to reduce friction for first-time or
> > infrequent contributors. And there are a few reasons to prefer GGG:
>
> That's fair enough - I haven't committed to submitGit for 2 years
> (it's continued to work without incident for most of that time I
> think!).
Yeah, it has been working fine as far as I know. I was a little curious
about how often (and about my impression that GGG was replacing it), so
I did some quick mining of the list archive. Here are numbers of
messages each month (from the last ~100k messages) mentioning Amazon SES
(presumably submitGit) or GitGitGadget in the message-id. I omitted
months with no entries for either, so there are some gaps:
ses ggg year-mo
--- --- -------
7 0 2015-07
2 0 2015-08
3 0 2015-09
1 0 2015-11
2 0 2016-01
3 0 2016-02
34 0 2016-03
27 0 2016-04
2 0 2016-05
6 0 2016-06
26 0 2016-07
54 0 2016-08
3 0 2016-09
29 0 2016-10
3 0 2016-12
4 0 2017-01
7 0 2017-03
5 0 2017-04
3 0 2017-05
23 0 2017-06
9 0 2017-07
14 0 2017-09
6 0 2017-10
8 0 2017-11
8 0 2017-12
38 0 2018-01
86 0 2018-02
49 0 2018-03
9 0 2018-04
1 0 2018-05
3 4 2018-06
0 86 2018-07
13 105 2018-08
0 65 2018-09
14 149 2018-10
7 131 2018-11
1 46 2018-12
14 96 2019-01
16 149 2019-02
0 44 2019-03
That measures pure patches, so they tend to cluster as there are often
several patches in a series. Poking manually at the ses hits, submitGit
seems to have been often used by GSoC and Outreachy applicants and
interns.
I don't know if any of this really supports or refutes my earlier commit
message, but I just thought it was kind of neat to see the numbers, so I
thought I'd share.
> > 2. Subjectively, GGG seems to be more commonly used on the list these
> > days, especially by list regulars.
>
> That's probably true too, though my interest with submitGit was more
> driven by helping early/first-time contributors than regulars. Though
> I'm sure GGG works well, in an ideal world it would be interesting to
> get a perspective from a cohort of those kind of users about what kind
> of flow works best for them - although, as I haven't been following
> development, maybe this has already been done?
I think the flow is quite similar, and GGG is definitely geared at
helping infrequent contributors, too. Dscho might have more thoughts on
this.
The biggest friction is marking a user as allowed to send. I think in
submitGit you have to "OK" the submitGit app sending on your behalf. In
GGG, somebody who already has been OK'd has to OK you with a comment in
the PR (after which you're approved for future PRs, too). It's possible
the approval could slow things down, but I think as long as users of the
tool are fairly prompt about approving non-spam PRs, it wouldn't be a
big deal.
> > I feel a little bad sending this, because I really value the work that
> > Roberto has done on submitGit. So just dropping it feels a bit
> > dismissive.
>
> Oh, you're very kind, that's ok! Very glad submitGit could help for a
> while, sounds like it was a good proof that GitHub could become part
> of the contribution process.
Yes, I think it definitely was.
-Peff
