7 ms·

Oh, this is one of my favorite (and sad!) dramas in free software. Five years later the main llvm developer proposed [0] to integrate it into gcc. Unfortunate

Oh, this is one of my favorite (and sad!) dramas in free software. Five years later the main llvm developer proposed [0] to integrate it into gcc. Unfortunately, this critical message was missed by a mail mishap on Stallman's part; and he publicly regretted both his errors (missing the message and not accepting the offer), ten years later [1]. The drama was discussed in realtime here in HN [2]. [0] https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00594.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9028738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9028738

LPisGood 1y ago
I feel like this is a sort of evidence that even for the most serious of engineers email lists are not an ideal way to communicate.
- enriquto 1y ago
  Still, we are discussing it almost 30 years after it happened. What alternative messaging system offers such openness and stability? I don't see anything other than publicly archived mailing lists.
  - riffraff 1y ago
    I think Mozilla has a bugzilla instance that's been around almost as much, e.g. this is 26 years old https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35839#:~:text=Closed%20Bug%2035839%20Opened%2025%20years%20ago%20Closed%2023%20years%20ago https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35839#:~:text=C...
    - db48x 1y ago
      Bugzilla is good for some things, but terrible for discussions, questions, offers, advice, etc, etc.
  - menaerus 1y ago
    JIRA /s
- klodolph 1y ago
  So, having been around a lot of different communication methods, I think email lists aren’t ideal, but for serious projects they’re better than all the alternatives. Chat has a way of getting completely lost. All your knowledge that goes into chat either goes into somebody’s head or it just disappears into the ether. This includes Slack, Discord, Teams, etc. Useful as a secondary channel but serious projects need something more permanent. Bug tracking systems just don’t support the kind of conversations you want to have about things. They’re focused on bugs and features. Searchability is excellent, but there are a lot of conversations which just end up not happening at all. Things like questions. That brings us back to mailing lists. IMO… the way you fix it is by having redundancies on both sides of the list. People sending messages to the mailing list should send followup messages. You should also have multiple people reading the list, so if one person misses a message, maybe another gets it. Mailing lists are not perfect, just better than the alternatives, for serious projects. (I also think forums are good.)
  - le-mark 1y ago
    Piling on about chat. Slack threads are an abomination. They aren’t inline with the main channel so you can’t cut and paste an entire conversation with threads. And does exporting a channel include threads? Who knows because the admin wouldn’t do it for me.
    - arccy 1y ago
      praise https://github.com/rusq/slackdump https://github.com/rusq/slackdump it does include threads, and no need for admins
      - f0rgot 1y ago
        You’ve saved my life!
    - oblio 1y ago
      Threads are amazing as an idea and what you're missing is just an implementation detail in Slack. More platforms should have threads (WhatsApp, etc).
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  There is no communication method where this isn't possible. Email can be missed, chat can be missed, phone calls can be missed, even talking to someone in person can be missed. All forms of communication can fail such that the person sending the message thinks it was received when it wasn't. So one would need evidence that email is more likely to fail in this respect, rather than evidence it can happen at all, to show that email is a worse communication method.
  - cerved 1y ago
    You can go yell in the others people ear
  - Y_Y 1y ago
    > All forms of communication can fail such that the person sending the message thinks it was received when it wasn't. With phone calls? Not that I suggest using calls as a way to manage your project, but at least you typically know that the recepient is there and listening before you transmit.
- kjs3 1y ago
  Sorry...maybe I'm dense. Email has worked for decades. If I don't catch something this relevant in an email forum, why would I automatically, without question, see it and understand its relevance in chat, Slack, etc. Serious question, since in my experience even specifically assigning someone a Jira tix doesn't guarantee they'll actually look at it and act.
- cperciva 1y ago
  It also speaks to an absolute failure of governance. If I missed an important email on a FreeBSD mailing list, you can bet that a dozen other people would see it and either poke me about it or just go ahead and act upon it themselves. The fact that RMS missed an email and nobody else did anything about it either is a sign of an absolutely dysfunctional relationship between the project and its leadership.
  - gpderetta 1y ago
    If I had to guess, the actual GCC maintainers[1] had no interest into integrating a very large codebase into GCC which would duplicate a lot of its functionality. LLVM could have been integrated under the GNU/FSF umbrella as a separate project of course. [1] since the egcs debacle was resolved, RMS has had very little control of GCC
- CamperBob2 1y ago
  The fault here was entirely Stallman's own. He has some kind of byzantine but ideologically-pure protocol for reading his emails in batches, which he has to request explicitly from someone or something that retrieves them for him. You can't infer anything from this episode about the suitability or unsuitability of email for any particular purpose.
  - nurettin 1y ago
    You could simply fix it by marking unreads bold. Doesn't sound so byzantine now does it?
  - dlenski 1y ago
    > He has some kind of byzantine but ideologically-pure protocol for reading his emails in batches, This caught my eye as well. I'm not sure what his objection to accessing email in a normal-ish way might be. Any ideas? My best guess is that it's something surveillance-related, but really not sure.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      I think OP might be confusing Stallman's website protocol with that for email: > I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. (he describes his arrangements in detail here: https://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)
    - rahkiin 1y ago
      https://lwn.net/Articles/262570/ https://lwn.net/Articles/262570/ Is what I found
- knorker 1y ago
  It's the worst, except for all the others. 20 years ago someone missed an important email. Every 20 seconds someone misses an important message in a thread hidden deep in a chat. I don't understand how we have moved from email and IRC to the various chats. The latter seem to actively hide communication, as some deliberate sabotage.
  - Timwi 1y ago
    We have moved from IRC “to the various chats”? ... IRC is a chat. What makes IRC special or different in your view apart from being old? I know that in the old days IRC chats were sometimes “made public” in the sense that a bot would scrape the entire chat and put it on the web. If that's what you're after, there's no technical reason I can think of you can't also do that with Discord except that it's not as trivial to implement because it's not just text and not just a single linear chatroom. The discussion here is about archivability and searchability and I'm really not sure an IRC log fits that bill any more than a hypothetical Discord log.
    - knorker 1y ago
      > What makes IRC special or different in your view apart from being old? I don't have a tonne of experience with all the chat offerings, just lots with one of the big ones, but to me the main flaw the new ones seem to have is that they have these "threads". Maybe I'm old and senile ("skill issue"), but if you reply to a message of mine into a thread, there's a 99% chance I'll never see it. Maybe this is a UI issue, not a skill issue. I have asked other people how they manage to follow updates in threads in order to see updates, and the answer seems to be that they don't. They just accept that many messages are just never seen by anybody. So it's not just me. IRC doesn't have this. Starting a new channel, while extremely low effort, is not as integrated in the message flow. So people don't, the way they spawn threads left and right in new chats. A second reason, in my experience (which may be atypical), is that IRC is seen as obviously not a replacement for a design or an email. But because new chats have more of an illusion of being authoritative rather than ephemeral, more people go "oh the rationale for that is in the discord/slack somewhere", whereas nobody with shame would ever say that about IRC. > archivability and searchability and I'm really not sure an IRC log fits that bill any more than a hypothetical Discord log. Yes, the Discord log is much better. But that's one of my points. It's better, so people choose it over something more suitable. So it's not "worse is better", but "better makes worse".
- hamburglar 1y ago
  Look, even the most serious of engineers would be thrown off their game and miss an important email if someone offered to buy them a parrot. I assume that’s what happened.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
jancsika 1y ago
Somebody back in 2015 mentioned a relevant response to Richard Stallman from David Kastrup[1]. It's brilliant. Did he convince other GCC devs with that post? Mentor younger devs on free software strategy? What's happened in the ten years since? C'mon GCC mailing list lurkers-- spill the tea! :) 1: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00516.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...
IshKebab 1y ago
Of course he wishes he had accepted the offer in hindsight, now that GCC is heading towards irrelevance (slowly, but it definitely is). Doesn't mean he would have accepted it he had seen the message.
- Longhanks 1y ago
  What? GCC is absolutely no way whatsoever heading towards irrelevance. In embedded, deskop Linux, and server Linux, almost everything is built with GCC.
  - IshKebab 1y ago
    Yeah because everything was built with GCC when LLVM was first created and it hasn't displaced them all yet. It will though. All new languages use LLVM as a backend - nobody is using GCC. Every company that writes some kind of custom tooling (e.g. for AI) uses LLVM. Most compiler research is done on LLVM. It will take a very long time (30 years maybe?) - I did say slowly - but the direction of travel is pretty clear.
    - uecker 1y ago
      LLVM is the playground for new languages and those that want to avoid GPL. But it is also a bloated mess. I personally prefer to invest my (limited) time into GCC, but actually hope that something new comes up. Or rather, that those big frameworks get decomposed into modular tooling around common standards and intermediate languages.
      - IshKebab 1y ago
        Yeah I agree it's a mess, but it's a mess that you can integrate with and augment fairly easily. There's definitely scope for a cleaner modern replacement (maybe written in Rust?). Absolutely enormous amount of work though so I won't hold my breath.
        uecker 1y ago

LPisGood 1y ago

I feel like this is a sort of evidence that even for the most serious of engineers email lists are not an ideal way to communicate.

enriquto 1y ago
Still, we are discussing it almost 30 years after it happened. What alternative messaging system offers such openness and stability? I don't see anything other than publicly archived mailing lists.
- riffraff 1y ago
  I think Mozilla has a bugzilla instance that's been around almost as much, e.g. this is 26 years old https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35839#:~:text=Closed%20Bug%2035839%20Opened%2025%20years%20ago%20Closed%2023%20years%20ago https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35839#:~:text=C...
  - db48x 1y ago
    Bugzilla is good for some things, but terrible for discussions, questions, offers, advice, etc, etc.
- menaerus 1y ago
  JIRA /s
klodolph 1y ago
So, having been around a lot of different communication methods, I think email lists aren’t ideal, but for serious projects they’re better than all the alternatives. Chat has a way of getting completely lost. All your knowledge that goes into chat either goes into somebody’s head or it just disappears into the ether. This includes Slack, Discord, Teams, etc. Useful as a secondary channel but serious projects need something more permanent. Bug tracking systems just don’t support the kind of conversations you want to have about things. They’re focused on bugs and features. Searchability is excellent, but there are a lot of conversations which just end up not happening at all. Things like questions. That brings us back to mailing lists. IMO… the way you fix it is by having redundancies on both sides of the list. People sending messages to the mailing list should send followup messages. You should also have multiple people reading the list, so if one person misses a message, maybe another gets it. Mailing lists are not perfect, just better than the alternatives, for serious projects. (I also think forums are good.)
- le-mark 1y ago
  Piling on about chat. Slack threads are an abomination. They aren’t inline with the main channel so you can’t cut and paste an entire conversation with threads. And does exporting a channel include threads? Who knows because the admin wouldn’t do it for me.
  - arccy 1y ago
    praise https://github.com/rusq/slackdump https://github.com/rusq/slackdump it does include threads, and no need for admins
    - f0rgot 1y ago
      You’ve saved my life!
  - oblio 1y ago
    Threads are amazing as an idea and what you're missing is just an implementation detail in Slack. More platforms should have threads (WhatsApp, etc).
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bigstrat2003 1y ago
There is no communication method where this isn't possible. Email can be missed, chat can be missed, phone calls can be missed, even talking to someone in person can be missed. All forms of communication can fail such that the person sending the message thinks it was received when it wasn't. So one would need evidence that email is more likely to fail in this respect, rather than evidence it can happen at all, to show that email is a worse communication method.
- cerved 1y ago
  You can go yell in the others people ear
- Y_Y 1y ago
  > All forms of communication can fail such that the person sending the message thinks it was received when it wasn't. With phone calls? Not that I suggest using calls as a way to manage your project, but at least you typically know that the recepient is there and listening before you transmit.
kjs3 1y ago
Sorry...maybe I'm dense. Email has worked for decades. If I don't catch something this relevant in an email forum, why would I automatically, without question, see it and understand its relevance in chat, Slack, etc. Serious question, since in my experience even specifically assigning someone a Jira tix doesn't guarantee they'll actually look at it and act.
cperciva 1y ago
It also speaks to an absolute failure of governance. If I missed an important email on a FreeBSD mailing list, you can bet that a dozen other people would see it and either poke me about it or just go ahead and act upon it themselves. The fact that RMS missed an email and nobody else did anything about it either is a sign of an absolutely dysfunctional relationship between the project and its leadership.
- gpderetta 1y ago
  If I had to guess, the actual GCC maintainers[1] had no interest into integrating a very large codebase into GCC which would duplicate a lot of its functionality. LLVM could have been integrated under the GNU/FSF umbrella as a separate project of course. [1] since the egcs debacle was resolved, RMS has had very little control of GCC
CamperBob2 1y ago
The fault here was entirely Stallman's own. He has some kind of byzantine but ideologically-pure protocol for reading his emails in batches, which he has to request explicitly from someone or something that retrieves them for him. You can't infer anything from this episode about the suitability or unsuitability of email for any particular purpose.
- nurettin 1y ago
  You could simply fix it by marking unreads bold. Doesn't sound so byzantine now does it?
- dlenski 1y ago
  > He has some kind of byzantine but ideologically-pure protocol for reading his emails in batches, This caught my eye as well. I'm not sure what his objection to accessing email in a normal-ish way might be. Any ideas? My best guess is that it's something surveillance-related, but really not sure.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    I think OP might be confusing Stallman's website protocol with that for email: > I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. (he describes his arrangements in detail here: https://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)
  - rahkiin 1y ago
    https://lwn.net/Articles/262570/ https://lwn.net/Articles/262570/ Is what I found
knorker 1y ago
It's the worst, except for all the others. 20 years ago someone missed an important email. Every 20 seconds someone misses an important message in a thread hidden deep in a chat. I don't understand how we have moved from email and IRC to the various chats. The latter seem to actively hide communication, as some deliberate sabotage.
- Timwi 1y ago
  We have moved from IRC “to the various chats”? ... IRC is a chat. What makes IRC special or different in your view apart from being old? I know that in the old days IRC chats were sometimes “made public” in the sense that a bot would scrape the entire chat and put it on the web. If that's what you're after, there's no technical reason I can think of you can't also do that with Discord except that it's not as trivial to implement because it's not just text and not just a single linear chatroom. The discussion here is about archivability and searchability and I'm really not sure an IRC log fits that bill any more than a hypothetical Discord log.
  - knorker 1y ago
    > What makes IRC special or different in your view apart from being old? I don't have a tonne of experience with all the chat offerings, just lots with one of the big ones, but to me the main flaw the new ones seem to have is that they have these "threads". Maybe I'm old and senile ("skill issue"), but if you reply to a message of mine into a thread, there's a 99% chance I'll never see it. Maybe this is a UI issue, not a skill issue. I have asked other people how they manage to follow updates in threads in order to see updates, and the answer seems to be that they don't. They just accept that many messages are just never seen by anybody. So it's not just me. IRC doesn't have this. Starting a new channel, while extremely low effort, is not as integrated in the message flow. So people don't, the way they spawn threads left and right in new chats. A second reason, in my experience (which may be atypical), is that IRC is seen as obviously not a replacement for a design or an email. But because new chats have more of an illusion of being authoritative rather than ephemeral, more people go "oh the rationale for that is in the discord/slack somewhere", whereas nobody with shame would ever say that about IRC. > archivability and searchability and I'm really not sure an IRC log fits that bill any more than a hypothetical Discord log. Yes, the Discord log is much better. But that's one of my points. It's better, so people choose it over something more suitable. So it's not "worse is better", but "better makes worse".
hamburglar 1y ago
Look, even the most serious of engineers would be thrown off their game and miss an important email if someone offered to buy them a parrot. I assume that’s what happened.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

jancsika 1y ago

Somebody back in 2015 mentioned a relevant response to Richard Stallman from David Kastrup[1]. It's brilliant. Did he convince other GCC devs with that post? Mentor younger devs on free software strategy? What's happened in the ten years since? C'mon GCC mailing list lurkers-- spill the tea! :) 1: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00516.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...

IshKebab 1y ago

Of course he wishes he had accepted the offer in hindsight, now that GCC is heading towards irrelevance (slowly, but it definitely is). Doesn't mean he would have accepted it he had seen the message.

Longhanks 1y ago
What? GCC is absolutely no way whatsoever heading towards irrelevance. In embedded, deskop Linux, and server Linux, almost everything is built with GCC.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  Yeah because everything was built with GCC when LLVM was first created and it hasn't displaced them all yet. It will though. All new languages use LLVM as a backend - nobody is using GCC. Every company that writes some kind of custom tooling (e.g. for AI) uses LLVM. Most compiler research is done on LLVM. It will take a very long time (30 years maybe?) - I did say slowly - but the direction of travel is pretty clear.
  - uecker 1y ago
    LLVM is the playground for new languages and those that want to avoid GPL. But it is also a bloated mess. I personally prefer to invest my (limited) time into GCC, but actually hope that something new comes up. Or rather, that those big frameworks get decomposed into modular tooling around common standards and intermediate languages.
    - IshKebab 1y ago
      Yeah I agree it's a mess, but it's a mess that you can integrate with and augment fairly easily. There's definitely scope for a cleaner modern replacement (maybe written in Rust?). Absolutely enormous amount of work though so I won't hold my breath.
      - uecker 1y ago