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> - Send the mailing list an email with a url for your repository. Request that they pull from it. We call this a “pull request”, rather than a “Pull Request”,

by count 4y ago

> - Send the mailing list an email with a url for your repository. Request that they pull from it. We call this a “pull request”, rather than a “Pull Request”, but it’s the same thing. This is the 'we have PRs at home' point of view. It's not WRONG, but I think it does miss the point. 'Just do everything different from what tons of other folks are doing day in and day out' is not the best answer. The project is well within it's rights to do so, but, there's a reason GitHub specifically is super popular, and it's mostly to provide structure and avoid the pain in the neck that the 'do it by email' and 'just use these different things' approach while collaborating.

db48x 4y ago
> 'Just do everything different from what tons of other folks are doing day in and day out' is not the best answer. Following the herd is definitely the wrong answer.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  Well, GNU does make both.
  - db48x 4y ago
    Ok, that made me laugh.
- dagenix 4y ago
  Following the herd absolutely can be the right answer. Especially if the question is how to reduce friction for contributors.
  - db48x 4y ago
    Everyone already has email. Not everyone wants to sign up for yet another web service. Email _is_ the low–friction option. Emacs even has a built–in way for any user to report a bug: just run `M-x report-emacs-bug` and it will give you an email template to fill out right there in your editor. No need to even open a separate program.
    - BeetleB 4y ago
      Everyone has email. Yet less than 5% of developers have set up email workflows so that they're not drowning in patch/mailing list emails. Organizing one's email does take a fair amount of effort - an effort that you don't have to make using services like Github.
      - db48x 4y ago
        Configuring your email client to sort and categorize your emails for you should be easy. If it’s not easy for you, then I suggest that you are using the wrong email client. Also, I note that Github emails you every time anyone interacts with your pull request, just the same as if it were a mailing list. I recommend a client called Gnus, which can score messages based on their content, and then sort by that score. That way messages about things you are interested in (such as your own patches, features that you care about, etc) float to the top.
        machinawhite 4y ago
        Would you enlighten us what email clients are so amazingly good, because everything other than Mail.app is a traumatizing experience that I'm trying to avoid. Gnus doesn't look very user friendly
        db48x 4y ago
        I really only know Gnus; it’s been a decade or two since I used anything else. I am also not really sure how to judge user–friendliness in this case. Now that I have customized it to my liking, Gnus displays exactly the information I want and has exactly the operations I want bound to keys that I like. That makes it very friendly to me, the only user I _really_ care about. I think the design goals of Gnus were not about allowing the user to get started quickly by having the same buttons as every other email client, but instead empowering the users to extend Gnus so that it does what they want. As a result, it may take longer to learn how to use Gnus but the ceiling is much, much higher. However, for bulk sorting of email I should actually have mentioned Sieve. It’s a standardized configuration language you can use to tell your server how to sort your mail, so that it is already done before your email client even logs in. Most IMAP servers support it, and it is pretty easy for email provide access to it. You can write simple rules like this: if address :is "From" "bugzilla-daemon@mozilla.org" { fileinto :create "INBOX.Bugzilla"; } elsif header :contains "list-id" "emacs-devel.gnu.org" { fileinto :create "INBOX.emacs-devel"; } and so on until all of your mail is sorted how you want it. It’s not a full programming language, so it cannot do everything, but it’s quite capable and pretty well standardized so you can take your filter rules with you if you change email providers. I use it even for simple rules like this so that all I need to do is paste them in when I move to a new provider. One doesn’t need to do that very often, but it only takes seconds to do instead of minutes or hours to reenter every filtering rule in a new UI. My current email provider is Fastmail. I discovered after I signed up that most of their mail–filtering settings get turned into Sieve rules that are shown to you when you go to add your own rules. I really like this because you can see exactly how spam is handled, how your vacation responders are implemented, how email from blocked senders is discarded, etc, etc.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by count 4y ago

db48x 4y ago

> 'Just do everything different from what tons of other folks are doing day in and day out' is not the best answer. Following the herd is definitely the wrong answer.

cercatrova 4y ago
Well, GNU does make both.
- db48x 4y ago
  Ok, that made me laugh.
dagenix 4y ago
Following the herd absolutely can be the right answer. Especially if the question is how to reduce friction for contributors.
- db48x 4y ago
  Everyone already has email. Not everyone wants to sign up for yet another web service. Email _is_ the low–friction option. Emacs even has a built–in way for any user to report a bug: just run `M-x report-emacs-bug` and it will give you an email template to fill out right there in your editor. No need to even open a separate program.
  - BeetleB 4y ago
    Everyone has email. Yet less than 5% of developers have set up email workflows so that they're not drowning in patch/mailing list emails. Organizing one's email does take a fair amount of effort - an effort that you don't have to make using services like Github.
    - db48x 4y ago
      Configuring your email client to sort and categorize your emails for you should be easy. If it’s not easy for you, then I suggest that you are using the wrong email client. Also, I note that Github emails you every time anyone interacts with your pull request, just the same as if it were a mailing list. I recommend a client called Gnus, which can score messages based on their content, and then sort by that score. That way messages about things you are interested in (such as your own patches, features that you care about, etc) float to the top.
      - machinawhite 4y ago
        Would you enlighten us what email clients are so amazingly good, because everything other than Mail.app is a traumatizing experience that I'm trying to avoid. Gnus doesn't look very user friendly
        db48x 4y ago
        I really only know Gnus; it’s been a decade or two since I used anything else. I am also not really sure how to judge user–friendliness in this case. Now that I have customized it to my liking, Gnus displays exactly the information I want and has exactly the operations I want bound to keys that I like. That makes it very friendly to me, the only user I _really_ care about. I think the design goals of Gnus were not about allowing the user to get started quickly by having the same buttons as every other email client, but instead empowering the users to extend Gnus so that it does what they want. As a result, it may take longer to learn how to use Gnus but the ceiling is much, much higher. However, for bulk sorting of email I should actually have mentioned Sieve. It’s a standardized configuration language you can use to tell your server how to sort your mail, so that it is already done before your email client even logs in. Most IMAP servers support it, and it is pretty easy for email provide access to it. You can write simple rules like this: if address :is "From" "bugzilla-daemon@mozilla.org" { fileinto :create "INBOX.Bugzilla"; } elsif header :contains "list-id" "emacs-devel.gnu.org" { fileinto :create "INBOX.emacs-devel"; } and so on until all of your mail is sorted how you want it. It’s not a full programming language, so it cannot do everything, but it’s quite capable and pretty well standardized so you can take your filter rules with you if you change email providers. I use it even for simple rules like this so that all I need to do is paste them in when I move to a new provider. One doesn’t need to do that very often, but it only takes seconds to do instead of minutes or hours to reenter every filtering rule in a new UI. My current email provider is Fastmail. I discovered after I signed up that most of their mail–filtering settings get turned into Sieve rules that are shown to you when you go to add your own rules. I really like this because you can see exactly how spam is handled, how your vacation responders are implemented, how email from blocked senders is discarded, etc, etc.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]