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by Nextgrid 2538 days ago
My issue with emails is that the user experience isn't as good and while it can be a worthwhile tradeoff for the points you mention, most of them are irrelevant in an enterprise setting (think using an internal SourceHut server instead of self-hosted GitLab or Bitbucket Server) so the UX benefit would be very much welcome.
1 comments
Sir_Cmpwn 2538 days ago
I honestly disagree that the user experience isn't as good, and I don't think people have enough faith to try it out for a while. I've spent thousands of hours in many workflows and I still find email to be the easiest and most efficient way of doing it.

However, I don't focus on the enterprise crowd, you're right about that.

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panopticon 2538 days ago
While that's probably true for seasoned OSS contributors, I think the email model is a tad abrasive for new/casual contributors.

I'm not necessarily saying it's the right choice for Source Hut, but I think it's part of the reason why Github is quite successful in the open source community.

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asdkhadsj 2537 days ago
I also think we're conflating use cases. Email is likely more efficient, I don't debate that. Yet I don't want it because of the time I do spend in a PR/MR UI (be it email or web ui) is so minimal that I want the process to be nearly fire and forget. The thought of learning some CLI based email client just so that I can merge a branch from someone else once a month feels.. well, it screams that it'll become like a Unix tool I rarely use.

I feel like he's asking me to open up Emacs every time I want to PR/MR, but I'm a Vim user. I don't have any email workflow currently, and I don't want to have to figure it out for a problem I don't have. He's telling me it's more efficient, but most cost vs savings ratio seems very off compared to what I imagine his is.

I don't disagree with anything he says about email, yet I have zero desire to try it out. If I was getting multiple MRs a day, or god forbid dozens a day, yea I'd be dying for something more efficient. But in the Emacs example, I wouldn't mind opening it if I was going to be doing it regularly.

Being required to use a workflow that you rarely use and is always in the "how did I do x?" part of your brain is a hard selling point for me. Even if that workflow is better, if I never remember how to use it what does it matter? It's still worse for me.

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