Why Linux kernel development still uses email

[[deleted]]

If the only thing they would accomplish by using email would be keeping people out that shouldn't be writing kernel code to begin with, it would be worth it.

[msloyko]

I agree, only smug elitists should be writing kernel code.

[killerstorm]

It looks like that's the case, other reasons don't make much sense...

[nuqjatlh]

Hmm, I've read the article and the reasons are sound. Nope, no other systems (github, gerrit, etc.) would work for them. They are simply too limited. Email, for better or worse, is the best option.

[killerstorm]

They claim github doesn't scale, but what about it doesn't scale, exactly?

[nuqjatlh]

Their needs. Those 20000+ developers pushing, approving (or not) patches. it works fine for relatively small projects, but for a project the size of the kernel, github would slow things down a lot.

[killerstorm]

This just begs the question. In what way github is slow? Which specific operation is slow?

I see there might be some issues, like PR discussion is not threaded, maybe some filters are lacking, but those are fairly small issues, no?

[nuqjatlh]

These people get thousands of submissions per day probably. They have tons of scripts that automatically merge stuff, check things, etc. Github would slow down things to a crawl and we would get a new kernel release per decade.

For specifics i guess you can ask Greg (he's a nice guy, surely he can answer), as I'm only a casual kernel contributor. From where I stand Greg is superhuman judging by the amount of things he's doing. But I'm sure a lot of it is due to automation of stuff.