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

From: Michal Suchánek <msuchanek@suse.de>
Date: Feb 2, 2024, 17:23 UTC
Message-ID: <20240202172327.GW9696@kitsune.suse.cz>
In-Reply-To: <20240202161643.GD119530@mit.edu>

On Fri, Feb 02, 2024 at 11:16:43AM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

Show 31 quoted lines

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

That's not to say that the mailing list traffic cannot be wrapped in another interface if somebody has the motivation and spends the effort to do it.

For example, there used to be (and maybe still is) a bidirectional gateway that bridged the ruby-talk mailing list into a web forum that was run by a person who thought it's a good idea, and resolved the problems that came out of it.

e-mails have pretty good 1:! correspondence to forum posts or forge PR comments. Some features like post edits or emoji reactions do not translate, and cannot be provided with e-mail backend.

However, presenting the mailing list through a different interface, and hosting the application doing the translation is a work that the person suggesting the change would have to do, or hire someone to do for them, rather than coming and saying 'Throw away all the tools you have now, and install and run this thing instead to make it easy for me'.

Thanks

Michal