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Email and Git = <3

git-send-email.io

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Re: Email and Git = <3

#71

Post by fodkodrasz »

oefrha wrote: post #54
emptysongglass wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really kills the fun when contributing to any FOSS project that fetishizes these tools and holds them up as some kind of proof of hacker cred. I've given up. The latency is too high and the tools are terrible.

“Want to contribute? Subscribe to our mailing list that sends a hundred emails a day.” Nope.

Subscribe to our mailing list, where we are rude and dismissive if you accidentally dare make a line longer than 50 characters, (didn't you read our netiquette?) as some members like to read their emails on outdated devices without text reflow capable display software. Also don't dare to use non-ASCII Unicode characters, or we will be rude and will ignore your request. Just spell your name in American, because that is what real programmers do!

Re: Email and Git = <3

#72

Post by ligurio »

tlamponi wrote: post #46
BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #21

I appreciate the effort here, but after learning the workflow and having to get all this set up on a few computers, having to configure git send-mail is honestly just needlessly annoying and absurd. Organizations that insist on using workflows like git send-mail and mailing lists not only drive away a significant number of potential contributors, but they also form a weirdly religious culture that fetishizes needless…

Configuring git send-email is trivial, definitively faster than creating an account at some web UI from a "source forge" – it's literally setting a handful of properties in the `.gitconfig` – and those are not specific to a project, but just your mail server settings you can reuse them for any project that accept patches over mailing lists. And using it for a project that accepts this workflow is such a joy, no need…

> Configuring git send-email is trivial, definitively faster than creating an account at some web UI from a "source forge" .

You forgot that mailing list requires subscription and in some cases it could be a tricky. Without proper subscriptions and confirming subscription, your mails with patches will go to trash.

Re: Email and Git = <3

#73

Post by sjamaan »

catern wrote: post #66
oefrha wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Want to contribute? Subscribe to our mailing list that sends a hundred emails a day.” Nope.

You don't have to subscribe to send a patch to a mailing list.

Presumably you'd be interested in any feedback, and not everyone CCs the original author in their reply.

Re: Email and Git = <3

#74

Post by ligurio »

I appreciate the effort here, but in the proposed workflow are missed steps with subscribing to a mailing list. Without proper subscriptions and confirming subscription, your mails with patches will go to trash.

Re: Email and Git = <3

#75

Post by keepamovin »

mikemcquaid wrote: post #18
keepamovin wrote: post #3

I love this. This is how it was done back in the days of usenet. People would email patches to the linux kernel. Hackers, working alone, late at night, strange times, strange places. Cultivating their work and skills and then ... shoot ... sending an email! Their contribution. So cool! Maybe we should go back to this. Get rid of the whole github thing. Every group their own little mailing list. Laboring in private!

Did you contribute to open source in those days? I did a little (KDE patches to mailing lists before I got Subversion access) and: it was _awful_. You think merging/rebasing/resolving conflicts is a pain now? Doing the same thing via email was _so_ much worse. GitHub has made some parts of open source worse (e.g. how easy it is to now open poor issues while ignoring required information compared to Bugzilla) but the…

Ha! I love your bias disclaimer -- and you have certainly brought Homebrew out of the darkages (no disparagement to the earlier works); it's noticeably more performant lately. :)

Your skepticism is understandable! GH seeks to bring this collab to all, but back then the skill required to even contribute was a barrier. But in a way that barrier was acceptable and useful.

The people doing it were skilled. The basic level of skill required to even contribute was a lot. I think there’s something to that.

As a 14-year-old it was beyond me, or so I thought, but in truth it probably wasn’t. But yep, you got me; I did not contribute! I was an observer, with a genuine admiration for the simplicity and effectiveness of that method of contribution. How sending something as commonplace as an email can have profound implications when it carries a valuable contrib!

Indeed GH has some joy. Yet while convenient, modern tools might lack the intimacy and individualism of the older, more decentralized methods, which can avoid the immediate public scrutiny that GH may entail.

I suppose you can consider my words an ode to the old ways, and an invitation to consider whether some elements of the past should be reintroduced in today's collaborative environs. This might sound whimsical (and perhaps not entirely accurate), but perhaps the "email method" was even more eco-friendly!

It's not so much I think those things you list are a pain, just the overall "structure of collaboration and social organizing algorithms" (please excuse me; I'm finding this hard to articulate!).

If don't get the vibe of my comment, I totally understand! It's intended to resonate with those who witnessed the evolution of dev practices and share my nostalgia for the early internet of the 90s.

My memories of watching patches flying over those email lists are forever tied up with that whole early internet nostalgia. I loved that stuff. I read zines, and printed off RFCs so I could smuggle them to school and read them, just to “stay in touch” with online, even when we couldn’t connect. :)

Re: Email and Git = <3

#76

Post by oefrha »

catern wrote: post #66
oefrha wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Want to contribute? Subscribe to our mailing list that sends a hundred emails a day.” Nope.

You don't have to subscribe to send a patch to a mailing list.

I have more than once subscribed just to report a bug or send a patch because the mailing list rejects emails from non-subscribers.

Edit: Btw, yes I have done the periodically-check-archive thing in the past, thank you. Hated it. Also missed a response once because I forgot to check and replier didn't CC. I realized like a month later.

Re: Email and Git = <3

#77

Post by fsociety »

ploum wrote: post #38
junon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my experience as well. I love the hacker culture associated with it and it's very fun to use e.g. Mutt, sr.ht, and git-send-email together, but it's anything but efficient and straightforward. I ultimately moved away from sr.ht for that reason.

Some, like myself, find the mouse really painful to use and hate graphical interfaces when you have to randomly click to find something (while you can read a man page, grep through it and then automatize the process in custom scripts). But it is not only about efficiency. It is about control and centralisation. Git-send-mail works everywhere there’s an email. It allows people to use the tool they prefer. It allows th…

> … GitHub forces you to be a slave of Microsoft … Relax, the hyperbole is out of control here. I use GitHub and am certainly not a slave.

Re: Email and Git = <3

#78

Post by BaculumMeumEst »

earthboundkid wrote: post #70
sneak wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s your bias showing; GitHub is primarily designed for getting work done, as it is a paid service that needs to serve its customers.

I think GitHub was designed for getting work done, but since Microsoft bought them, they are slowly moving into enshitification territory. For example, they have a homepage that is just a wanna be social media feed and the file contents pages have ads for Copilot and in general there are ads for VSCode and blah blah. It was pretty good, but it's going to get much worse. :-)

I disagree on enshittification. The only practical change I've noticed in github usage is the improvements to code search, which has been unbelievably useful. It gives me the ability to do complex searches to find real usages of even the most obscure libraries, examples of poorly documented configuration files, and more, from any public repository hosted anywhere on github.

That capability comes from both the large body of source code available to the platform, and the large amount of engineering work put into that particular feature. It is one of many usability benefits is not available anywhere else.

Re: Email and Git = <3

#79

Post by dsaravel »

mkmk wrote: post #36
vimsee wrote: post #2

Not related to Git + git-email. I just want to say that I love the way this website is structured. Also, it renders fast.

It’s miserable on mobile. Confusing unlabeled next button at the bottom of the page, plus an orange next button that seems to do the same thing but sometimes randomly overlaps the content. Why not have all the content on one page?

I did not test on mobile and maybe it should have all the steps in single page for that aspect ratio (easier to simply scroll). However, for desktop, it was such a beautiful way to guide the reader each step of the way. It was really well done.

Re: Email and Git = <3

#80

Post by Hackbraten »

oefrha wrote: post #76
catern wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to subscribe to send a patch to a mailing list.

I have more than once subscribed just to report a bug or send a patch because the mailing list rejects emails from non-subscribers. Edit: Btw, yes I have done the periodically-check-archive thing in the past, thank you. Hated it. Also missed a response once because I forgot to check and replier didn't CC. I realized like a month later.

Even then, you’re free to opt into daily digests if you’re a subscriber. The message ID allows you to reply to individual messages and threads nonetheless.
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