I'm a beginner in elisp (and tbh in programming in general) but would like to help.

For me pull request model is much more natural than mailing lists and patches. It doesn't matter at all if its GitHub, GitLab or (my personal preference as it's lightweight, open source and easy to use) Gitea (interestingly it's not present in comparison on https://forgeperf.org). I don't even know how to make PR on sourcehut and can't find any tutorial.

Of course I will try to learn in order to help org but the entry barrier is much higher than for Git(Lab/Hub/ea).

EDIT: I just found orgmode code on Gogs here: https://code.orgmode.org/bzg/org-mode

That's great! I'll register and try to help soon! Mabye it should be more visible and linked in docs (I'll... make a PR I suppose? :)

You can still do pull requests over email.

Rather than attaching a patch, you simply send a link to your git repository (+branch if applicable), and the maintainer can pull from it.

We don't use code.orgmode.org for Org's development.

But please clone Org's repo, make a patch - perhaps with https://magit.vc - and attach it to an email you send to emacs-orgmode@gnu.org: that's all it takes.

Then we will help with polishing your contribution :)

Alright. Now, let's say everyone is busy, and the maintainers have no time to review the patch. Who's going to remember that someone sent an email with some improvements a few months later? AFAIK There's no easy way to find all the emails with patches that weren't merged/(not) accepted/upvoted/downvoted/closed/etc. It's not easy to refer to the specific email; it's difficult to pinpoint the exact conversation around a specific change using git-blame. GitHub/Gitlab/etc. make all that a lot simpler.

Reviewers possibly use org-mode to keep track of those things. Would be trivial if Emacs is their mail reader.

For those who are really taking advantage of org-agenda et al, I'd argue GitHub issue tracking UI is far more restrictive for tracking patches.

If I were in that position I'd be duplicating issues into org-mode anyway (or using an Emacs mode to interact with/sync them). Maybe that's the missing link?

Isn't org-mode part of emacs now? You don't require the FSF copyright assignment paperwork?

Interesting, I did not expect to find fennel there!