Add a README.md?

[stefanhaller]

Hi Johannes, I'm very happy that you took on maintainership (we talked about this at Git Merge last year).

Would you consider adding a brief README.md (or CONTRIBUTING) file? Right now it's unclear what your preferred way of receiving contributions is. PRs in this repo? Patches on the git mailing list? (I hope not...) Something else?

[j6t]

We could do that. Is there a template somewhere so that I only need to fill in the blanks? 😁

[stefanhaller]

No idea, but also it doesn't have to be fancy or anything. It should probably say that

• this (github/j6t) is now the official home of gitk (there are so many clones around that this is not obvious)
• that git.git regularly pulls from here via subtree merges
• the preferred way of contributing is via X.

I'm happy to make a PR with a suggestion, but you didn't answer that third bullet point, so I'm not sure what to put there.

[avih]

As far as I know, this repo is merged into the master git repo prior to releases (not sure exactly how, but it's supposed to preserve the gitk history in the master repo).

So it might need some consideration on whether/how adding a gitk readme may affect this procedure and where it would/should end up.

[stefanhaller]

@avih It will end up in the gitk-git/ subdirectory of git.git, and that's a good thing. In the past, people have often sent patches for gitk (in that subdirectory) to the git mailing list, and then they had to be told to redo the patch against Paul's standalone repo; having a Readme in that subdirectory that explains this is good.

But the point is valid that whatever we put into that Readme needs to make sense no matter in which context you read it; for example, we must not use terms like "here" or "this" when we mean the github.com/j6t/gitk repo, so thanks for bringing this up.

[j6t]

I'm happy to make a PR with a suggestion, but you didn't answer that third bullet point, so I'm not sure what to put there.

The only way to review patches in a meaningful way is via email. (The Github review system is ... unusable.) Also, the audience is much wider so that more feedback could be expected. But I won't dismiss Github pull requests.