Torvalds indicated in a recent interview that they’re struggling to find young maintainers. Many people contribute, but few stay around to become proficient enough and take on the responsibility of maintainership. I believe that the email comment was made in this context.
However, I don’t think that many kernel devs including Torvalds are in favour of the Github workflow. He once indicated his strong dislike for it. So the replacement for email won’t be Github - but something just as easy, without sacrificing the quality that the kernel devs need.
Finally, a word is kernel development. Contrary to popular belief, they aren’t hostile to new contributors. Kernel developers have high quality intro material for newbies - including for email workflow. They’re also very considerate and patient with newbies. Even Torvalds who was known for his abrasive style in the past really took that only on experienced developers doing the wrong thing.
Thanks for the insight.
So the replacement for email won’t be Github - but something just as easy, without sacrificing the quality that the kernel devs need.
Hopefully it will not be some old-ass software that looks like it was designed together with dinosaurs. I’m curious how they’ll make the decision and what they will decide on. I’m one of the people who won’t touch a project using mailing lists, but tbf, I wouldn’t have the time to contribute to the linux kernel atm anyway. For those that do and are turned off by mailing lists, it’s a pity however.
Mailing lists aren’t that hard if you have the right tools. For most people, it’s just a few lines of configuration. But there are a lot of hidden tools for emails that you simply don’t get with PR workflow. You’ll get very attached to them once you start. That’s the reason why many kernel devs are so attached to emails.
I’m curious, what tools are you talking about?
I’ve never had a good experience with mailinglists and find them impossible to navigate. For example: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/[email protected]/T/#m1f842978210ac8ef1a4d9b7f7b0206cf7fdf1964
What is happening here? Where is the patch? Where at the comments on the patch? Is each email a commit?
The are enormous quotes and “squash it into this function”, then then entire quote is quoted again (scroll, scroll, scroll), “OK, I’ll squash it”.
Then it seems like somebody has hard-wraps (probably at the archaic 80 characters because they still work on a 4:3 CRT) which change the format of everything mentioned before.There is so much visual noise in mailinglists which is cleaned up significantly by source forges. You don’t have to read the same quoted code every single time somebody comments on that bit of code in the thread. Then there’s the forever repeated To, From, CC, title and other stuff. The clutter is immense.
Even if they decided to keep mailinglists, they could at least put on a better UI, but the next problem will be people who don’t conform (either because they’re new, forgetful, etc.). It’d be like trying to get people to write perfect XML each time and the UI could break in amazing ways depending on how the person formats their response.
I grew up with shitty UIs (windows 3.1 and windows 95), but mailinglists are even worse.