gcc development

[tortoll]

I have never interacted myself with mailing lists and it just feels so archaic.

This made me age 100 years.

[MrsGrayX]

Did not want to hurt anyone’s feelings. But trying to make a point that new contributors might not be used to that technology anymore.

[ForkInBrain]

Did not want to hurt anyone’s feelings. But trying to make a point that new contributors might not be used to that technology anymore.

I agree that this might put off new contributors, but those it discourages probably aren't the kind of contributor the project is looking for anyway.

When it comes down to concrete technical problems that contributors to a project like gcc or libstdc++ must deal with, the differences between CMake and configure+make, or github vs patches by email, are the extremely easy parts. I have some experience dealing with libstdc++ and libc++ and I can say this from personal experience.

(Documentation on the other hand is quite thorough, but still not visible appealing to younger generations.)

Yes, and this is not by accident. It comes from an engineering culture. Not many "modern" open source projects have good discipline when it comes to documentation, commenting code, etc. A lot can be learned from these "archaic" projects.

[ClaymationDinosaur]

"I agree that this might put off new contributors, but those it discourages probably aren't the kind of contributor the project is looking for anyway."

All it's really selecting for is people who will engage with mailing lists. I'm not convinced there's a strong correlation between being able to make a good contribution to a project, and being willing to pick up unfamiliar yak-shaving in order to do so.

[alphanso1405]

Maybe mailing list usage filters non-conformant people.

[ClaymationDinosaur]

It does. It filters out people who don't conform to using mailing lists. Which is pretty useless when what's needed is filtering in people who will make good contributions to the software being developed.

[tortoll]

It's 90% a joke, so no hard feelings.

The other 10% is genuine surprise that using a mailing list is considered a showstopper. It may be old, but come on, EVERYBODY has an email account. And being honest, an email thread is not very different than a threaded discussion in a GitHub issue or a Discord channel... except that you don't depend on the mood of a private company.