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On your substantive point, I have no quarrel whatsoever with mixing old and new tech. I think we all do that, in practice. But what we're talking about is not j

On your substantive point, I have no quarrel whatsoever with mixing old and new tech. I think we all do that, in practice. But what we're talking about is not just whether we mix old and new tech but where we go from here given that GitHub-based development has its problems. If there are good examples of new OSS projects that use mailing list based workflows, I'd love to hear them. The usual examples (see elsewhere in this thread) are, like Linux, usually pretty dated. My view is that the mailing list-based workflow seems to have some real problems and just advocating a return to it is... probably a bit short-sighted. As far as your comments about what makes an argument self-refuting, my point is that it is potentially contradictory to say that X is considerably better than Y even while you can't actually be bothered to do X. If X is "gender equality" then the analogy would be "We should all practice gender equality but as a man I personally want my wife to stay home and keep house." That's self-contradictory in a specific way that "I'm a man and I advocate gender equality" just isn't.

gkya 8y ago
On both points, every problem has its own set of best solutions. If your problem is running a big community around a big project where running listserv+debbugs (or the like) is just minutiae, that's the best way to go. If you're medium-to-big, there are umbrella projects that can adopt your project and supply you these tool (e.g. GNU and Apache do this), but your project would need to be useful to some bigger audience and comply with the umbrella project. Otherwise you can just put a the source code up your server as tarballs or VCS repos maybe using one of the readymade web interfaces (viewvc, cgit, gitweb, hgweb, etc.) and hosting your discussions on sth. like librelist.com or google groups; or just use sth. like GitHub or Gitlab without much worry. Principles are best when they are abstract and a few. Then we apply them to concrete situations. If that makes the best answer to perpetually be "it depends", be it so, for its better than cargo cult answers. Also, the discussion does not seem to be around Github alternatives, as the arguments against it in the article could equally be made against Gitlab (a private instance or the public one), Bitbucket or similar. The article is comparing two models, and is not about a post-Github world.

gkya 8y ago

On both points, every problem has its own set of best solutions. If your problem is running a big community around a big project where running listserv+debbugs (or the like) is just minutiae, that's the best way to go. If you're medium-to-big, there are umbrella projects that can adopt your project and supply you these tool (e.g. GNU and Apache do this), but your project would need to be useful to some bigger audience and comply with the umbrella project. Otherwise you can just put a the source code up your server as tarballs or VCS repos maybe using one of the readymade web interfaces (viewvc, cgit, gitweb, hgweb, etc.) and hosting your discussions on sth. like librelist.com or google groups; or just use sth. like GitHub or Gitlab without much worry. Principles are best when they are abstract and a few. Then we apply them to concrete situations. If that makes the best answer to perpetually be "it depends", be it so, for its better than cargo cult answers. Also, the discussion does not seem to be around Github alternatives, as the arguments against it in the article could equally be made against Gitlab (a private instance or the public one), Bitbucket or similar. The article is comparing two models, and is not about a post-Github world.