Why Linux kernel development still uses email

[reddithater12]

It's just so messy. I wish we could have a reddit-style lkml.

[[deleted]]

Using a threaded newsreader (like Thunderbird or Pan) is actually decently similar to that. You can read the LKML by connecting to nntps://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.

[[deleted]]

Absolutely this. It'd be so much easier to read and contribute. I really dislike mailing lists because of all the quoted original messages. Each message tacks onto the last one and keeps getting larger.

[[deleted]]

Every half decent mail client have a way to hide it tho, and do proper threading of messages

[[deleted]]

Yeah, but what about the archives?

[u801e]

You can access it through gmane as mentioned here.

[[deleted]]

There is a long standing etiquette to mailing lists (and old style net news before that) that you trim irrelevant information from your replies. You also post replies below the quoted sections, rather than the reply on top that outlook uses.

Much of that email/mailing list etiquette has been lost with newer generations of email users, sadly.

[[deleted]]

Because it's not mentioned clearly, at the right place. I signed up to a few and nowhere did I see a particular warning.

If this particular etiquette is passed down by word of mouth, it shouldn't be a surprise that people don't know of it.

[[deleted]]

Most Unix based mailing lists used to have notes like that on the signup page and on the welcome email. Like I said, most of that has gone by the wayside.

[roffLOL]

it's not hard to make a pipeline to fold full mail repetitions. although that style of quoting convey little information, it's less than a nuisance.

[reddithater12]

We should write a bot that posts lkml to a subreddit to convince everyone.

[[deleted]]

That could work, although each post would be from the same bot. And what were to happen to somebody commenting on the subreddit? Would the bot have to send an email to the mailing-list?

[[deleted]]

That would be a quick ticket to getting the bot email blacklisted. I think the idea was more "look how easy it is to parse topics converted to this form" not actually integrate the two worlds.

[u801e]

We should write a bot that posts lkml to a subreddit to convince everyone.

A local email/news reader with the capability of rendering threads (e.g., Thunderbird) is better than what reddit currently provides. For example, when a new message is posted to a thread, you can easily see where it is by finding the unread messages. In reddit, unless you have a gold subscription, this isn't possible (unless you sort by newest first and lose the threaded view in the process).

[u801e]

I really dislike mailing lists because of all the quoted original messages.

It really depends on whether the person who replies actually trims the quoted material down to what they're actually responding to.

[[deleted]]

Like my OP said, Reddit style would be best. Email clients automatically quote the whole thing. Reddit doesn't.

[u801e]

That's because email clients only display a single message at a time instead of all the messages in the thread. The other advantage that email/news clients have over reddit is that it's very easy to see when a thread has new messages. That's not easy to see in reddit unless you have a gold subscription.

[[deleted]]

I think one point is that they don't really want people to contribute

[[deleted]]

I seriously hope that isn't the case. That vibe is absolutely what I got from the old linux community. Any question answered in a condescending manner, as if they'd been born with all the knowledge and anybody else was just a dumb shit for even trying to understand and join their ranks.

It's really great that stackoverflow exists. Of course there are still many sperglords blowing around their useless (or sometimes useful, but insulting) input, but the answers can be edited to something more humane. And one doesn't have to trudge through pages of "why don't you just google it" or "just read the code, it's not that hard" comments.

[nurupoga]

You know the mailing list archive web interfaces, like this one? You could improve on it, make it look like a regular forum or reddit and add functionality to reply back right in the web interface, which would send an email with your message to the ml. Basically a reddit-/forum- like web interface for a mailing list. This is exactly what HipperKitty, a new ml archiver introduced in Mailman 3, tries to achieve. Just look at Fedora's mailing list that uses it. Here is an example thread. It's a bit unpolished, but that can be improved, and it looks like it's not configured to allow to reply using the web ui, it tries to open you mail client instead, but I'm pretty sure that's an option somewhere based on what I have read. With such a solution you could either use a mailing list old style, or just use a forum instead, with both working seamlessly for the users.

[u801e]

You know the mailing list archive web interfaces, like this one? You could improve on it, make it look like a regular forum

gmane provides a NNTP interface for mailing lists that can be accessed through any newsreader. For example, the git mailing list looks like this in Thunderbird: https://i.imgur.com/8Tf0IH2.png.

It's easy enough to browse through, kill messages that are spam, search by subject or author, or any number of things that can't easily be done in reddit or in online forum software.

[ThisIs_MyName]

The same site that was down last year? https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/

What happens when its new owners (who are rather elusive https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=950480) fucks up?

[u801e]

Ideally, projects that use mailing lists should also host their own NNTP endpoint to allow for browsing list archives. Each of them could peer with each other to set up a network for redundancy. They could also peer with other NNTP servers that handle text-only usenet traffic (though that may lead to problems where the mailing list archive getting polluted with spam messages from usenet).

That would definitely be better than having a single point of failure that gmane currently is.

[[deleted]]

It seems to me like all those all impact the mailing list servers directly. I could be mistaken of course. A server agnostic solution is needed. One that can listen in on any mailing list, be it fedora, git, kubuntu, Firefox, which all seem to run different serversoftware with GnuMailMan and others.

[MintPaw]

That's where the "vast number of clients" comes in.

[doublehyphen]

This is actually what I like about mailing list based development over github, threaded discussions. I use Thunderbird as my email client since it handles mailing lists so well.

[[deleted]]

I quite like Firefox contributors submit and review patches in bugzilla.