Re: Best practices for indicating what address to send patches to?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 19, 2024, 18:25 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqv811i6ij.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <87msmdmfwc.fsf@posteo.net>

Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

>> It would not be an improvement to add a mechanism to make it easier
>> to find "here is the address" to a reader who hasn't even discovered
>> where these contributor guide documents are.
>
> But is that an argument to prevent projects with mild or now contributor
> guidelines to make the patch-driven workflow more difficult?

Projects can actively refuse to use such a "feature", if it is expected to encourage undesirable behaviour by new contributors. And projects that do not care can use such a "feature". In that sense, I can see a future in which such a "feature" exists but not used by everybody. But introducing such a "feature" that is not necessarily an improvement and can actively harm projects that use it is tricky. You'd have to document the upsides and the downsides to allow projects to make informed decisions if they want to adopt it.

Stepping back to your original question, you asked if this is intentional and if this was discussed in the past.

The answer is this is more organic and not with an explicit intention, but in hindsight, because submission address is just a small piece of information projects want to publish together with other guidelines, not having a mechanism only to give the submission address would *not* have helped projects all that much. With the explanation behind the answer to the first question it should be easy to see why nobody talked about such a "feature" in the past, which is the answer to your second question.