Re: Migrate away from vger to GitHub or (on-premise) GitLab?

From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Feb 2, 2024, 16:16 UTC
Message-ID: <20240202161643.GD119530@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <008b01da55eb$9f3c36d0$ddb4a470$@nexbridge.com>

On Fri, Feb 02, 2024 at 10:22:18AM -0500, rsbecker@nexbridge.com wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> >
> >Did you consider to rather read the list through
> >gmane.comp.version-control.git nntp newsgroup?
> >
> >This way you get only very specific mails in your mail-box, those
> >where you are explicitly CC'ed, and you usually get more support
> >for structuring from NNTP readers than from mail clients.
> 
> Google is dropping Usenet NNTP updates on 22 Feb 2024. I would love
> that idea, but it has a limited lifespan.

Google might be dropping Usenix NNTP updates, but news.gmaine.io and nntp.lore.kernel.org are not not run by Google. So whether or not Google groups are supporting NNTP is not really supporting.

One other thing I would note that is that if someone isn't interested in following most of the git mailing list, it's unclear how much they can actually contribute. Maybe they could fix spelling or grammer issues in the git man pages, but it's unlikely they could actually make code contributions.

So from an open source project perspective, which is primarily run by volunteers, each open source project has to make a cost-benefit tradeoff as far as the *project* is concerned. Individuals do not have a fundamental human right to contribute to a project. Hence, the open source project doesn't owe an obligation to spend a huge amount of effort supporting some kind of forge web site just because some potential contributors are clammoring for it. Especially if they are saying that they can't be bothered to follow the mailing list traffic because it's somehow too much.

(Of course, I have all of the Linux kernel mailing list flowing into my inbox, and have e-mail practices that can handle that load --- so it's hard for me to have much sympathy about people complaining that the e-mail load for git is too large --- compared to LKML, it's *nothing*. :-)

						- Ted