@mupuf
It's complicated. 🥴
But Linus recently indicated that it's maybe time to move on from email. We'll see.
Maybe the DRM developers should talk more about their solution and how it works really well for them, then maybe other kernel subsystems might follow suit.
I mean, even git is kinda still optional and one major subsystem until maybe two years ago was sending all their stuff as a patch-bomb to Linus.
This would be a great development for new contributors!
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.
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.
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.
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