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> Hello Konstantin,
>
> On 2024-02-01 16:39, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 01, 2024 at 12:10:11PM +0000, Hans Meiser wrote:
>>> is there any current discussion about moving Git development away
>>> from using
>>> a mailing list to some modern form of collaboration?
>>>
>>> I'd like to be able to follow a structured discussion in issues and
>>> to
>>> contribute to the Git documentation, but the mailing list currently
>>> just
>>> bloats my personal inbox with loads of uninteresting e-mails in an
>>> unstructured waterfall of messy discussion that I am not able to
>>> follow
>>> professionally.
>>
>> Here's a perspective from the world of Linux kernel, where this
>> discussion is
>> continuously raging. Funny enough, the main objection a lot of kernel
>> maintainers have to forges is that it makes it really hard to find
>> relevant
>> discussions once the volume goes above a certain threshold. These
>> folks have
>> become *extremely* efficient at querying and filtering the mailing
>> list
>> traffic, to the point where all they ever see are just those
>> discussions
>> relevant to their work. They love the fact that it all arrives into
>> the same
>> place (their inbox) without having to go and click on various
>> websites, each
>> with their own login information, UI, and preferred workflow.
>>
>> The kernel maintainers are able to review tens of thousands of patches
>> monthly
>> with only about a hundred or so top maintainers. To them, this system
>> is
>> working great, especially now that some tools allow easy ways to
>> query,
>> retrieve, verify, and apply patches (shameless plug for lore, lei, and
>> b4
>> here).
>>
>> The obvious problem, of course, is that these folks are FOSS's
>> "marathon
>> runners" who got really good at their workflow, but the situation is
>> different
>> for anyone else who is just starting out. Any new kernel maintainer
>> stepping
>> up obviously finds this overwhelming, because they aren't yet so good
>> at
>> filtering the huge volume of the mailing list traffic and to them it's
>> just a
>> torrent of mostly irrelevant patches.
>>
>>> Are you consideration for migrating?
>>
>> Yes, of course, this is constantly under consideration. There isn't
>> some sort
>> of anti-forge cabal that is preventing things from going forward, but
>> there
>> are some serious hurdles and considerations to consider:
>>
>> - How to avoid a vendor lock-in? Those of us who have been around for
>> a while
>> have seen forges bloom, and then shrink into irrelevance (e.g.
>> bitkeeper)
>> or slowly ensh*ttify to the point of unusability (sourceforge).
>> GitHub is a
>> proprietary service owned by a single company who are currently
>> FOSS-friendly, but have certainly been extremely FOSS-hostile in the
>> past.
>> GitLab is open-core, and the current record for open-core projects
>> isn't
>> very encouraging (Puppet open-cored themselves into irrelevance,
>> Terraform
>> has gone full-proprietary, among most recent examples). Full-FOSS
>> alternatives exist, but people aren't really that enthused about
>> using
>> less-popular solutions like Forgejo, because they hate unfamiliar
>> UIs almost
>> as much, or even more than they hate unfiltered mailing lists.
>>
>> - How to avoid centralization and single points of failure? If Linux
>> or Git
>> move to a self-hosted forge, how do we ensure that an adversary
>> can't stop
>> all development on a project by knocking it offline for weeks? This
>> has
>> literally just happened to Sourcehut and Codeberg -- and as far as
>> anyone
>> can tell, the attacker was just bored and knocked them out just
>> because they
>> could. Yes, you can knock out vger, but this will only impact the
>> mailing
>> list -- people can still send around patches and hold discussions by
>> temporarily moving to alternative hosts. With the distributed nature
>> of the
>> mailing list archives, this can even be largely transparent to
>> anyone using
>> lei-queries.
>>
>> - How to avoid alienating these hundreds of key maintainers who are
>> now
>> extremely proficient at their query-based workflows? We're talking
>> about an
>> extremely finely-tuned engine that is performing remarkably well --
>> we don't
>> want to disrupt development for months just to try things out with a
>> forge
>> and find that it isn't working out.
>>
>> Finally, there's also the consideration of current trends. One upside
>> of "AI"
>> (LLM, really) technologies is that they are extremely good at taking
>> in a huge
>> source of data and finding relevant information based on natural
>> language
>> queries. I can very easily see a mechanism spring up in the next year
>> or less
>> where you can issue a query like "send me any threads about reftables
>> or
>> promissory remotes if they contain follow-ups from Junio" and
>> reasonaly expect
>> this to work and work great -- all while keeping things decentralized
>> in
>> addition to distributed.
>>
>> Above all, this isn't a "forges are terrible and shouldn't be used"
>> response
>> -- they are clearly useful, especially when it comes to CI
>> integrations. A
>> large part of my work is bridging forges with mailing lists and
>> vice-versa,
>> which I hope I'll be able to do in the near future (GitGitGadget
>> already does
>> it with GitHub, but my goal is to have a pluggable multi-forge
>> solution). I
>> just wanted to highlight the aspects that aren't necessarily obvious
>> or
>> visible from the outside.
>
> Thank you very much for taking your time to write this down!
> Much appreciated.