Why kernel development still uses email (2016)

Post by nextos » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 8:56 PM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #58

nextos wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran Gnus with notmuch backend (nnir-notmuch) for many months. It's not very fast as Gnus is not very quick on Maildirs. Scoring could be quite easy to implement with auto-tagging. Tags are a unifying concept in email. You can implement any custom user logic with tags. What notmuch is missing is a bit of tooling to do this. It'd be cool if this tooling had access to any arbitrary header, as you have pointed out. I f…

Autocompletion from the notmuch database is fine when you don't have many addresses in there. But when you are subscribed to a bunch of large mailing lists and you try to search your notmuch database for "John" you're going to get a thousand completion candidates. If instead you search just your BBDB database, which only has the contacts you actually correspond with, you're going to get just the useful and relevant o…

Post by abiox » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 9:57 PM UTC

na85 wrote: post #61

abiox wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

btw "echo chamber" is generally perceived as disparaging, so it's not weird people wouldn't be impressed by that. and feigning victimhood after antagonizing people is pretty gauche.

It was intended to be disparaging: one of my major beefs with this community is the massive culture of groupthink and aggressive self reinforcement/adulation.

Post by IncRnd » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 10:31 PM UTC

u801e wrote: post #15

IncRnd wrote: post #2

It doesn't make sense for large projects to move to other systems. Control is lost of the history, which automatically disqualifies any platform. Using services others than e-mail will also entail a revamp and move to a different service every few years. Email is a far lower cost and more reliable medium most other methods.

I've always wondered why newsgroups aren't used instead of email. They pretty much have the same advantages of email and they're far better in terms of searching archives compared to email. Web interfaces for searching email list archives are painful to use. If it wasn't for services like gmane (and later public-inbox), it would be very difficult to view archives of those lists.

Post by snaky » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 10:54 PM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #8

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #3

One of the best things about email is that, with the right client, you can view discussions as hierarchical trees. That means you can have multiple simultaneous discussions about a topic asynchronously and not lose track of anything. GitHub and the like only work that well when there's maybe one or two things being discussed at once, because there's just a single linear stream of comments.

This is one of the things that web-based forums have yet to get right. Email (and NNTP news) clients from 20 or 30 years ago are far superior in this respect, because they can intelligently deal with threading and folding. These features alone makes large conversations much easier to deal with than on web-forums. To add to that, email (and NNTP news) clients even from 20 or 30 years ago have other powerful features t…

Post by walshemj » Sun, Oct 01, 2017, 12:00 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #45

jasode wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>; what about developers who refuse to use the email-based process? I guess I don't understand your question. In Linux, the email-as-the-workflow[1] has been agreed upon from Linux Torvald and his lieutenants all the way down. I suppose that if a one refused to use email-based-workflow, they'd have to find a Linux kernel maintainer to be a champion for their proposed changes and submit them on their behalf. (Is this…

If Linus declared that everyone must use, say, Gitlab from now on, some Linux developers might leave. But developers who don't use email may never start working on Linux. That's why it cuts both ways: either option alienates some developers.