On Sun, Jan 22, 2017 at 08:50:49AM -0700, brynn wrote:
"Patches welcome" has become a flippant and dismissive way to say, "well, fix it yourself".
Most of my experience helping Inkscape users is in forums (approx 8 years), as opposed to the mailing list (approx 2 or 3 years). I've never seen this suggested in a flippant or dismissive way.
I could see a webpage....or a section of a webpage, which has kind of a pitch or invitation. Without looking, I don't remember specifics, but I think parts of the faq (user faq on the website) already do this. So it could be made into a page or section of a page. Since people have all different kind of issues, we couldn't provide the support info. But it could include generalized support info, along with everything else I mentioned above. And then when we find ourselves thinking "patches welcome", we could link to it, rather than type it all out, every time.
Or would that be too impersonal? If the Inkscape project is known for being a friendly community (as someone said earlier) it could be written in sort of a warm, fuzzy way.....if that would help? Just a thought :-)
I think that's a brilliant idea. You're right that we have written bits along these lines in the past, which could be extracted, dusted off, and polished to be more digestible to a more modern audience.
You're right that there's probably a few different "types" of people so maybe a few different pages to message in different ways would make sense. I.e. one that talks to people who could get into coding work might focus on explaining branches and patch contributions, whereas another page might come from the angle of someone who isn't AT ALL interested in coding and instead just address good non-coding ways to contribute. Another one geared for translators, another maybe for evangelists, yet another specifically focused on usability testing. Or something like that.
Would you like to take a shot at extracting the existing text and roughing it into a more useful shape? I think I could contribute verbage to the pages, or link in someone to help.
Bryce