On Monday, 2 February 2015 11:22:57 CEST, David Jarvie wrote:
I occasionally contributed patches in the past to Qt, but since the current gerrit setup was introduced I've never even contemplated doing so because it looks too much effort to get to grips with. It's far too off-putting for occasional contributors.
Seems that the Qt project has a big problem in the *perceived* complexity of getting involved, then. I'm saying perceived because you said that you did not try; the mere fact that they use a tool which has a rumour of being hard to use, along with the state of their documentation, suggests to you and to others that it is apparently a big pain to get involved. I understand that people do not want KDE to end up that way.
However, we also have people with little to no experience using Gerrit just fine. Shall we therefore focus on explaining that contributing through Gerrit is actually not painful?
The fact that the Qt project uses an obsolete version of Gerrit along with a non-stadard workflow and keep changing the branch names certainly doesn't help. I can see why it's confusing to "suddenly see no master branch", for example.
Anyway, the proposal which I have for solving this problem is about writing nice documentation. Maybe even screencasts showing how easy it can be for a total beginner to send their first patch.
With kind regards, Jan -- Trojitá, a fast Qt IMAP e-mail client -- http://trojita.flaska.net/
