Ludovic Courtès
#GNOME replaces its mailing lists with Discourse:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2022-September/msg00018.html
As someone who grew at a time where email was an unquestioned, decentralized foundation of #FreeSoftware workflows, moves like leave a bad taste in my mouth. I understand how Discourse facilitates onboarding, but the idea of delegating to a central server and using the browser as the sole user interface remains unappealing to me.
Getting old?
Alexandre Oliva
Ludovic Courtès
@ebassi @khinsen @abcdw Which is “a fate worse than death” is a matter of perspective. I’m not saying patch over email doesn’t have its warts, but you’ll find many free software hackers disagree with this assessment.
Emmanuele Bassi
@abcdw @civodul @khinsen That's not our experience. Though, of course, if you start contributing a lot to GNOME, you can ask to get an LDAP account, and then you get single-sign-on for all GNOME services.
If you're referring to being able to send patches via email, that's just false economy: you have a steep set up cost (git send-email is not a simple thing), and then you get stuck with patches over email, which is a fate worse than death.
Andrew Tropin
@ebassi @civodul @khinsen ? I really like the way it looks, but don't like the fact that for each interaction with any new project I have to create an account on gitlab/gitea instance to send a simple patch or to comment on the ongoing discussion, it seems that adding one more registration requiring tool will only increase this pain.
Emmanuele Bassi
@abcdw @civodul @khinsen No, you can't do that. You need to have an account on the Discourse instance.
Depending on the configuration of the instance, you may also need to actually browse it and interact with it a bit to raise your user level, before you can open topics just by sending an email.
Andrew Tropin
@civodul @khinsen @ebassi Do you know if Discourse supports email as a primary way of interaction? Is it possible to interact with a thread without registration on the discourse instance?
Ludovic Courtès
@khinsen @ebassi I like the idea too. Maybe Discourse’s email support goes in that direction? Delta Chat seems to be for small groups, from what I understand.
Ludovic Courtès
@ebassi I’ve found Discourse’s onboarding features smart—messages essentially getting you to learn the etiquette, to better understand where the other person is talking from (whether they’re a newcomer or not), and so on. It probably helps lower the barrier to entry and make interactions smoother.
(I find it intriguing though that we need such “social prostheses” in the first place; is the on-line etiquette too different from real-life interactions?)
Alexandre Oliva
Aleksandra Fedorova :fedora:
Tools like Gerrit or GitHub or Discourse _try_ to turn some common parts of those custom workflows into something which can be shared with newcomers. But they will never reach that same level of productivity the custom solution has.
And the question then is - should we push others to invest 20-years worth of effort into learning the most productive ways?
Or do we agree to compromise on a not perfect, but tolerable ways to run things.
Aleksandra Fedorova :fedora:
The other way to look at it though is that people praising email-based workflows mistake their local custom IDE-like suite of scripts and automations they collected over more than 20 years for email.
It is not the *email*-workflow which people find comfortable, but rather a tailored for your personal preferences elaborate custom solution, which uses email protocol somewhere in the background as an implementation detail.
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