> Project documentation can suggest a workflow, but people who regularly contribute can optimize/change it for their convenience. What really matters is what w

> Project documentation can suggest a workflow, but people who regularly contribute can optimize/change it for their convenience. What really matters is what works for the project maintainers and core contributors. Workflow for interacting with a project is different from workflow for interacting with email, a central tool to the rest of our lives. Git workflow is malleable. If I have to change my email workflow to contribute to your project, I probably just won't contribute, or contribute less. I'm a committer to gdb, but this is one of the reasons I dread putting up patches and often procrastinate. I have an unsynced MUA locally which I do use, but I still don't like it. Like I said, you can make it so that you only use the mail client for patch contributions, but that feels heavyweight. I've tried that (indeed, it's what I currently do), and it's really annoying. > I don't really see it as a problem. I have an email account that was provisioned roughly 8 years ago and the total folder size is around 1.2 GB That's just you, though. Mine is 7GB. On my current laptop that doesn't matter. I used to be on an older laptop that didn't have much space, was partitioned and dual booted, and regularly ran out of space. 7GB was a lot. > it's not something that I have to deal with more often than I end up setting up a new computer But we are talking about setup. We are talking about the setup time for contributing to a project for people who don't already use MUAs. > Perhaps having an email based process forces those who are willing to be more involved in the process, and discourages those who just want to drop code off and be done with it (without ever following up). I think this attitude does more harm than good. I've been involved with projects with more explicit mentoring, and this has always been a net positive -- for every contributor who drive-by drops a patch, we have many more new contributors who start off clueless but end up being valuable members of the community. > I wouldn't call it "blundering". It's a learning experience. If someone isn't willing to to put the time into independently learning (with assistance as needed) something Not everyone can afford to sink unlimited time into things. Making it easier to use things helps these people get involved. Besides, folks don't always approach open source project with the singular goal of contributing to that particular project. Sometimes they just want to do some open source stuff in the field of their choice to learn. If your project is annoying to get involved in, they will choose a different one -- they're still motivated, just not for your project in particular. Your project doesn't exist in a vacuum. This is a fundamental disagreement of opinion we seem to have here -- you don't particularly care about such contributors, I do, and I think that such projects (which try hard to keep it easy to contribute) I've been involved in have benefitted tremendously from this. To each to their own, I guess.