4 ms·

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).
    - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
      They're really bolted on in Slack though. I've been using Slack since 2019 and they were bolted on and annoying then, and they still are. Their biggest problem is that nobody uses them, though.
      - roryirvine 1y ago
        Threads were introduced in, what, late 2016? The start of 2017? Some time around then, anyway. They were even more badly integrated at the start; there was no way to be notified about new messages in a thread, for example. By 2019 things were a little better, but - as you noticed - still not great. And since then... nothing. No more improvements. Development seems to have more or less halted since the Salesforce acquisition. I used irc for a couple of decades before Slack, so was happy with purely linear chat (yeah, I'm also one of those weirdos who likes rebasing in git). Threads make everything more horrible, but at this point it feels like I just have to put up with it.
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]

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).
  - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    They're really bolted on in Slack though. I've been using Slack since 2019 and they were bolted on and annoying then, and they still are. Their biggest problem is that nobody uses them, though.
    - roryirvine 1y ago
      Threads were introduced in, what, late 2016? The start of 2017? Some time around then, anyway. They were even more badly integrated at the start; there was no way to be notified about new messages in a thread, for example. By 2019 things were a little better, but - as you noticed - still not great. And since then... nothing. No more improvements. Development seems to have more or less halted since the Salesforce acquisition. I used irc for a couple of decades before Slack, so was happy with purely linear chat (yeah, I'm also one of those weirdos who likes rebasing in git). Threads make everything more horrible, but at this point it feels like I just have to put up with it.

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]