Re: Concerns about community contributor support

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Bastien <bzg@gnu.org> writes:

> Hi Tim,
>
> thank you very much for your detailed answer.
>
> Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Yes, but with some caveats. 
>
> Thank you!
>
>> For these reasons, I'm probably not the best person to assist with the
>> review and guidance for patches aimed at adding/extending functionality.
>
> The role of a "contributor steward" is to address the issues Timothy
> originally raised about contributors not receiving answers when they
> take the time to send a patch or a bug report, it is not about making
> technical decisions.  Of course, your advice as a long-time user on
> these decisions is always very welcome.
>
>> However, I would be happy to
>>
>> - Assist in trying to reproduce and confirm bugs
>> - Assist in extracting additional information and providing
>>   guidance/clarification for bug reports 
>> - Assist with documentation
>> - Provide some guidance on patches, particularly bug fixes.
>
> That's exactly what is badly needed to discharge core maintainers from
> routine tasks and to let them focus on technical stuff.
>
> This has basically been my role in my early years of maintainership:
> making sure to keep this list as welcoming as possible, to continue to
> attract new people with new ideas (and new bug report).  This is a
> somewhat undervalued role, but a deeply necessary one -- so again,
> thanks for helping here.
>
>> My time availability can vary greatly depending on work. 
>
> That's no problem.  We have a team of Tim's :)
>
>> Also, as a
>> blind user, my ability to reproduce bugs can sometimes be hampered by
>> the necessity of running Emacspeak in conjunction with org mode (they
>> can sometimes interfere with each other). However, apart from that, more
>> than happy to help where I can, so if your happy, sign me up!
>
> If the task becomes too much for you, you can always say that you
> won't be available for a while.
>
> Thanks!

OK, consider me 'singed up". Today I will see if I can re-jig my mail
system to make it easier to track and respond. As Timothy seems to be
doing a fine job 'catching up' with what is already on updates.orgmode,
I'll leave that alone and will focus on responding to new bug reports,
patches etc which come through the list.

I'll also setup a 'clean' virtual image so that I have a vanilla, clean
Emacs config I can use for evaluating/reproducing bugs (current emacs
stable 27.2). .

What is our position with bugs which can only be reproduced in the
current development version of Emacs? I'd expect we track them, but
focus more on Emacs stable given that dev is a moving target and any
bugs may be resolved by later changes in Emacs?

Finally, is it also necessary to monitor org bugs reported to the emacs
bug tracker or are they sent on to the emacs-orgmode list via some other
process? (I currently do monitor emacs-devel but not the bug tracker). 

-- 
Tim Cross