I haven't used them but I think the most important benefit is collaboration (sending pull requests etc...) is done via email and thus is less centralised platfomr than github/gitlab which uses their own mechanisms.
- The whole premise assumes that you need to make a new account for each project you contribute to, because they're hosted on individual gitea or similar instances. Some are, but let's be honest, the vast majority of projects are currently hosted on a very small set of services (github, gitlab, one or two others), and most developers will already have accounts on them.
(I get that part of the goal is to eliminate dependency on large code hosting services, and I agree with that. But we should do that with federation standards so people can use individual gitea/whatever instances without making accounts on all of them, not by traveling back in time 20 years.)
- He spends a lot of time complaining about silly password requirements. The complaint is valid but not relevant to the comparison.
- The graylisting thing is an own-goal, sorry.
- He complains that forking the repo and creating the PR require context-switching from the cli to the web and back, but there are cli tools that can fork repos and create PRs for you on github, gitlab, etc. to fix that.
- Let's allow that submitting a single patch, starting from outside the project, is faster for the contributor with an email workflow. But that's a tiny part of the process. There's a lot of things that happen after that patch: the project maintainers have to triage it, they have to review it, make comments on specific lines of the diff, or sometimes on line that aren't part of the diff, and then indicate that the submitter should make changes and try again. The submitter then has to make changes and submit it again. The reviewers, at that point, will probably want to see the diff between the first and second revision.
Triage: The github/gitlab UI for this is not great but acceptable. Viewing a mailing list in my email client mixes discussion and patches. I can't mark threads with labels or priorities. I can't assign a particular review to a particular person and have it show up in their todo list.
Review: Sure, you can reply to a patch posted on a list and intersperse comments, but web uis for code review are pretty decent these days. You can easily see much more of the context when required, your comments and replies on specific lines get threaded even across revisions of the code, each comment thread can have an individual "done" indicator, etc. The review as a whole has a global status of whose turn it is to take an action next. All of these seem much harder by email; you end up just using a lot of conventions.
You can use a web-based review tool with email-based patches, of course, but... why bother? If you're doing web-based review, just do the whole workflow there and it'll be a lot simpler and easier to understand.
Resubmit: Resubmitting a patch set by email posts brand new diffs. How do I see the differences between different versions of the patch? Sure, I can rig up a bunch of scripts to do this, but is it integrated with the review tool, etc.?
- What happens when I become a maintainer? I have to sign up for a new mailing list. And that means I have to go in my email client settings, make a new folder, make a new filter rule to direct email from that list into that folder. That's a huge amount of friction that doesn't exist in the web-based workflows.
When that video was made, github CLI was not an official thing, and I have never even heard of a gitlab CLI.
You can mark emails with labels though depending on your Email client. The onus is on you. SourceHut also supports adding labels to SourceHut tickets through email I believe.
You can assign a review to someone. You literally just CC them on the email.
> And that means I have to go in my email client settings, make a new folder, make a new filter rule to direct email from that list into that folder. That's a huge amount of friction that doesn't exist in the web-based workflows.
If that is a lot of friction for you, then you probably either have a horrible email client, or don't know how to use it.
> When that video was made, github CLI was not an official thing, and I have never even heard of a gitlab CLI.
I used "hub" back in 2013, so it's at least that old. It wasn't official, though I'm not sure why that makes any difference. Searching on google for "gitlab cli clients" shows a bunch, at least some of which have histories dating back to 2013.
> You can mark emails with labels though depending on your Email client. The onus is on you.
But those are local to you and your client. I'm talking about labels that are shared state, that the whole project and the public can see. Those are widely used on github for categorization, triage, communicating the stage of the review, etc. They're undeniably useful to teams. You can put all that information in English text in email bodies, but then everyone has to read a whole thread to understand the state of things, and there's more potential for confusion.
> You can assign a review to someone. You literally just CC them on the email.
Same thing: how do I assign a reviewer so that everyone can quickly and unambiguously see who is assigned to review that PR/patch set? With PR metadata, this is trivial. With mailing lists, it depends on social conventions.
> If that is a lot of friction for you, then you probably either have a horrible email client, or don't know how to use it.
Thank you for insulting my intelligence. I didn't say it's hard, I said that it adds friction.
I'm not claiming that the web-based PR and review UI works for everyone; obvious email works fantastically well for Linux (though I'm not convinced something else couldn't work even better). I do think it works very well for small to medium size projects (which are most projects, after all).
An accurate comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of each model would need to be much more thorough and look at the entire development cycle, for projects of different sizes. I don't agree that that video was anything like that. It seemed like a cheap shot, based on one cherry-picked metric (time to submit an initial patch starting from nothing) that's not particular representative.