I have no interest in changing what Evan wants to do or how to best add something to any part of the Elm ecosystem. The core issue I want to get at is exactly this:
All the guess work the rest of us have to do. You’re a stalwart in the community, and you’re still guessing. What I’m getting from your post though, is that you don’t believe there is any need to guess. We can just accept that things are as they are, because everything is actually okay.
I don’t believe this is true. There are surely a number of ways the process around Elm development could be enhanced (depending on what you want to achieve), but I think it’s worth assessing some things that are currently wrong:
- A number of people have been burnt badly trying to contribute. Like Luke and Dan, but other stories come to mind.
- People are recommending Luke’s blog post as introductory reading about Elm.
- We don’t have an answer to either problem. If you’ve been burnt using Elm, no matter how badly, there’s no empathy. Have you considered using a different language?
(This list is not exhaustive, but those are at least some points that are relevant to the topic)
What if you’re the next one to get burned? You, @rupert, are probably not, because you’ve got enough experience with the community and the philosophy behind Elm. But what about all those who don’t? They’re left to guess, and many of us here have to just guess as best we can.
I have a feeling this significantly limits the community. And the first step, in my mind, is to add more transparency. A hypothetical Governance page could just say:
If you make something cool, you may get it merged. It’s very rare though, so don’t aim for a merge. Preferably you should spend your time and energy on something outside what the core team is involved in.
But I think we can do better, because that’s clearly not the whole answer. Evan has requested more contributions, and there’s still questions like “Okay, if I can’t expect a fix to be pushed to a core package quickly, how can I patch it myself?” (you can’t), or “Why isn’t my simple spelling correction PR getting merged?” (it’s anyone’s guess).
The point here is not to funnel more contributions into Elm, but simply to provide understanding for how things work. For the benefit of everyone hopefully.