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by ahnick 2915 days ago
How would someone new to a project who might benefit from looking at historical patches AND the commentary surrounding them be able to access that information in an email-driven workflow? In a pull request model on GitHub, you can go in and view all the old comments from the pull request and get a good understanding of how/why a feature was implemented. Missing the contextual explanation of a feature and only being able to look at the commit history if you weren't on the mailing list to begin with seems like a big limitation to me. Or am I missing something?
3 comments
ddevault 2915 days ago
Mailing lists usually have public archives. Here are the archives for Linux and its various subsystems:

http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html

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StillBored 2914 days ago
Right but, then you have to sift through the dozens of unrelated comments, and if there are multiple versions of the patch frequently finding them and cross referencing the changes can be painful.

You need look no further than the versionX->versionX+1 logs some of the kernel developers do to understand the problem. From one patch set to another the conversation around a piece of code gets lost, so much so that for long running patch series people will frequently show up and make the same request someone earlier in the series made because they missed the 20 emails talking about the pros/cons of doing something a certain way 6 months earlier.

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imtringued 2914 days ago
Using an email archive is almost equivalent to using a centralised service like github.
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ddevault 2914 days ago
There are 7 or 8 independently operated mirrors of the linux kernel mailing list archives. On top of that, thousands of people have local spools of the list that could be used to rebuild it in the event of catastrophic failure.
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wmf 2915 days ago
I recommend news.gmane.org but you'll need an NNTP client like Thunderbird to access it.
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ajdlinux 2914 days ago
A lot of email-based projects use tools like Patchwork (https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/) to provide a web interface to patches. I agree that it's still a really suboptimal experience compared to e.g. GitHub.

(disclosure: I'm an occasional Patchwork developer)

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