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> First, you generally have to join a mailing list, which is regularly broken, or requires someone somewhere to manually acknowledge your membership. You can u

> First, you generally have to join a mailing list, which is regularly broken, or requires someone somewhere to manually acknowledge your membership. You can usually just send your patch to mailing list without joining at all and you will be replied off the list. > Then, you have to figure out how they want shit formatted, figure out how to generate a diff (I've been using SVN for 8+ years, git for ~3 years, and have never had to deal with diff files!) Unbelievable. The only explanation I can find is that you avoided dealing with diffs and used SVN only on your workplace. > Plus, just reading mailing lists is a fucking disaster. Literally no mailing list host I know of lets you just view a complete topic thread in simple chronological order on ONE PAGE. Mailing lists are supposed to be read in your email client. If you want an archive, use NNTP archive like gmane.

mememachine 10y ago
Why would anyone have to deal with diff files during regular usage?
- username223 10y ago
  Let's say I found a bug in some software I use, and tweaked a few lines to fix it. Now what do I do? (1) Mail a diff to the author. (2) Get an account on some random website, "fork" the code, make the tweak again, and "submit a pull request." I'll choose (1) every time, and will probably just shrug and move on if I'm forced to do (2). I've made a few throwaway GitHub accounts when I cared enough, but I usually don't bother.
  - vopi181 10y ago
    I don't like the centralization around a proprietary software, but saying GitHub is a random site isn't fair. A lot of F/OSS people use it. Out of curiosity what happens when you want to submit say a picture to a repo?
    - username223 10y ago
      I'm not a graphic designer, so I don't usually do that, but I'd probably email the author or development list. Projects with lots of binary files checked into version control are very different from source code, though, so I don't know how they normally operate.
- gkya 10y ago
  That's what version control is about. Patches upon patches, since SCCS.
  - fake-name 10y ago
    Diffs are an internal part of how VC works. There is literally no reason you would ever have to deal with them in their raw format.
fake-name 10y ago
> You can usually just send your patch to mailing list without joining at all and you will be replied off the list. News to me. The few times I've gone through the hoops, the ML's have said things like "you have to join to send mail". I think there's at least one ML I'm still waiting on the join confirmation mail. > Unbelievable. The only explanation I can find is that you avoided dealing with diffs and used SVN only on your workplace. No, you see there are other ways of interacting with shit like that. With tortoisesvn and tortoisegit, I maybe have to use the command-line git once or twice a month, and that's generally for unfucking coworkers merge-attempts. There are also other ways of dealing with merges, like actual tools for that (winmerge, meld, etc...). I don't see any reason to actually deal with the underlying diffs basically ever. > Mailing lists are supposed to be read in your email client. If you want an archive, use NNTP archive like gmane. I was specifically complaining about NNTP archives. I've yet to see a mailing list archive that's readable in a sane manner. And the point is, if I'm a new contributor, I'm not already subscribed to the mailing list, and therefore have no way to reading it in my client, which still doesn't provide a nice "forum-thread" like view which is the best way (in my opinion) of consuming that sort of discussion.
- ajdlinux 10y ago
  In my experience, in communities that use mailing lists for patch submission as opposed to just discussion, it's the norm to keep posting open to non-subscribers. In the Linux kernel we use so many separate mailing lists that to subscribe to all of them when you just want to send a couple of patches would be a complete disaster. Protocol is to keep posting open to everyone and to ensure that you always use Reply To All to keep every list and individual in the loop on replies. I don't disagree with you though that mailing lists are painful - and I particularly agree that the archive experience is sorely, sorely, sorely lacking.
zeveb 10y ago
> Mailing lists are supposed to be read in your email client. If you want an archive, use NNTP archive like gmane. Of course, GMANE went down, and when it came back old GMANE URLs are now broken. I do read all my email in gnus, though, precisely because newsgroup-style mailing lists are so awesome. It's another one of those things: I'm amazed by the lengths people go to in order to justify using inferior solutions like web browsers and web mail when emacs & decades-old software is so much better.

mememachine 10y ago

Why would anyone have to deal with diff files during regular usage?

username223 10y ago
Let's say I found a bug in some software I use, and tweaked a few lines to fix it. Now what do I do? (1) Mail a diff to the author. (2) Get an account on some random website, "fork" the code, make the tweak again, and "submit a pull request." I'll choose (1) every time, and will probably just shrug and move on if I'm forced to do (2). I've made a few throwaway GitHub accounts when I cared enough, but I usually don't bother.
- vopi181 10y ago
  I don't like the centralization around a proprietary software, but saying GitHub is a random site isn't fair. A lot of F/OSS people use it. Out of curiosity what happens when you want to submit say a picture to a repo?
  - username223 10y ago
    I'm not a graphic designer, so I don't usually do that, but I'd probably email the author or development list. Projects with lots of binary files checked into version control are very different from source code, though, so I don't know how they normally operate.
gkya 10y ago
That's what version control is about. Patches upon patches, since SCCS.
- fake-name 10y ago
  Diffs are an internal part of how VC works. There is literally no reason you would ever have to deal with them in their raw format.

fake-name 10y ago

> You can usually just send your patch to mailing list without joining at all and you will be replied off the list. News to me. The few times I've gone through the hoops, the ML's have said things like "you have to join to send mail". I think there's at least one ML I'm still waiting on the join confirmation mail. > Unbelievable. The only explanation I can find is that you avoided dealing with diffs and used SVN only on your workplace. No, you see there are other ways of interacting with shit like that. With tortoisesvn and tortoisegit, I maybe have to use the command-line git once or twice a month, and that's generally for unfucking coworkers merge-attempts. There are also other ways of dealing with merges, like actual tools for that (winmerge, meld, etc...). I don't see any reason to actually deal with the underlying diffs basically ever. > Mailing lists are supposed to be read in your email client. If you want an archive, use NNTP archive like gmane. I was specifically complaining about NNTP archives. I've yet to see a mailing list archive that's readable in a sane manner. And the point is, if I'm a new contributor, I'm not already subscribed to the mailing list, and therefore have no way to reading it in my client, which still doesn't provide a nice "forum-thread" like view which is the best way (in my opinion) of consuming that sort of discussion.

ajdlinux 10y ago
In my experience, in communities that use mailing lists for patch submission as opposed to just discussion, it's the norm to keep posting open to non-subscribers. In the Linux kernel we use so many separate mailing lists that to subscribe to all of them when you just want to send a couple of patches would be a complete disaster. Protocol is to keep posting open to everyone and to ensure that you always use Reply To All to keep every list and individual in the loop on replies. I don't disagree with you though that mailing lists are painful - and I particularly agree that the archive experience is sorely, sorely, sorely lacking.

zeveb 10y ago

> Mailing lists are supposed to be read in your email client. If you want an archive, use NNTP archive like gmane. Of course, GMANE went down, and when it came back old GMANE URLs are now broken. I do read all my email in gnus, though, precisely because newsgroup-style mailing lists are so awesome. It's another one of those things: I'm amazed by the lengths people go to in order to justify using inferior solutions like web browsers and web mail when emacs & decades-old software is so much better.