Moving to GitLab

Could you elaborate on why that is? The git and linux kernel projects have been using this workflow for decades and it works very well for them.

> The world evolved and offers now better environments than 20 years ago.

I think that's largely subjective. I have experience reviewing code via email and via a Github Enterprise instance.

The Github based review requires far more scrolling and makes it difficult to find comments that were made and how they were resolved. Plus, it makes the implicit assumption that a comment was resolved if the line commented on was changed in any way regardless of whether or not the change is related to the comment made. When that happens, it collapses the comment thread and requires that I expand them to find out what I commented on and determine whether it was addressed by going to another tab to read through the entire diff, find the approximate location of the line I commented on and see if it was changed as I expected.

With the email based workflow, my email client has a built in index of all the comments made on a patch set threaded by commit that I can click on and I can quickly find the comments I made and any responses to them (and whether or not I've already read them). I can easily get different versions of the patch set and run a diff between them to see what changed (either on the entire diff or on each individual commit).

> The world evolved and offers now better environments than 20 years ago. No reason to stay behind.

I believe that if something should be considered an improvement, then it should have all the capabilities of the previous version and introduce new features that were not possible to accomplish in the previous version. It shouldn't make things that were easy to do in the previous version more difficult or impossible to do.

I believe Github recently deployed a feature to do just that, but that hasn't made it over to the enterprise version. In either case, it's something that's been a source of problems for quite a few years.

> Right off the bat you need to have been subscribed to the list for a significant amount of time to do what you're describing

That's one inherent limitation with email lists. Fortunately, both public-inbox and gmane provide a NNTP gateway to allow for access to list archives with an interface that's, for all practical purposes, identical to email.

As an aside, I've always wondered why open source projects like git and linux never adopted NNTP (not necessarily on usenet) as a primary form of communication (and and email CC contributers of code that you're changing) instead of using an email list.

> this requires a lot of setup & technical expertise from your contributors [...] You're already looking at maybe a week of setup time

I simply don't see how it requires significant expertise or a week to set up. Using a client like Thunderbird for reading the list (or NNTP gateway) doesn't take that much to set up (other than entering the server information and credentials to send replies). Setting up one's git configuration for using git-send-email (to send patches) is only a one time thing as well and isn't any more complex.

Years ago, ISPs commonly provided help pages that gave the server information to set up your client to access one's email account hosted on the ISP and how to access the NNTP server to get on usenet. You didn't need significant technical expertise to follow the instructions on those pages and many non-technical people successfully configured their clients to receive/send their email and participate on usenet newsgroups.

I don't just mean the setup required to send a one-off patch. Obviously setting up some random E-Mail client with IMAP is easy. But the sort of setup required to get anything like feature parity with common operations in GitHub's or GitLab's interface.

E.g. when you open a Pull/Merge request on those sites. It's easy to apply & download the patch series locally to test it. For E-Mail client integration you need something that'll "git am" a range of messages. Likewise with "git push" to your topic branch updating the PR/MR. Sure you can do this all manually with git-format-patch and git-send-email, but having something that works smoothly takes a lot of work.

And nowadays the network effects of that setup don't make sense for most contributors, because so few projects still use E-Mail like this. There's a large long tail of contributors to these projects, e.g. the median for patches in git.git per contributor is 2.